Full of Prostitutes

It's about 7.15AM and I'm wheeling my bike down our driveway, about to go out.

'Yo!' It's Shooty the Drug Dealer walking along our road at this time of morning for some reason. 'Whose car is that?'

I ignore him because he's a knob.

'Yo!' again, 'whose car is that?'

I look at him. He's looking at me, and at the car right behind me. He's looking at the car which is parked in our driveway. He's looking at our car, which is parked in our driveway, and has been parked in our driveway more or less all day, every day for at least the last few years.

'It's our car,' I tell him, seemingly somewhat redundantly.

'What?'

'It's my wife's car.'

'Oh. I thought it was Kimberley's car.'

I have no fucking clue who he's talking about. 'No,' I confirm. 'It's our car.'

He wanders off mumbling about something being full of prostitutes, which is the actual expression he uses, in case anyone thinks I'm making this up. It sounds as though he means that Kimberley's notional car is full of prostitutes.

Who fucking knows?

A week later it's more or less the same encounter, except this time he wants to know have I seen a six-year old boy running around. This would be his son. Apparently he's mislaid the kid. You know how those things just run off and who can tell what the fuck they get up to? The question is put to me at 7AM as I step out of the front door to call the cats in for breakfast. I'm still in my pants. The weird thing is that I get the distinct impression of Shooty having emerged from behind the small lemon tree in our front yard, as though he's been waiting, or was lurking.

'No, I haven't seen a six-year old boy,' I tell him. 'I've only just got up.'

Weeks pass and then he turns up on our porch one evening. He doesn't actually knock at the door, instead being content to shout at it.

'You been calling up my grandmother, bitch?' he enquires. 'You better not be saying shit about my grandma, puta.'

All of this is recorded on our Ring, which is a door bell with a built-in camera activated by movement. Following the recording of Shooty proposing that we refrain from discussing his grandmother in scurrilous terms, we have a video of him sat on our porch for an hour between two and three in the morning.

He's back again the next evening, this time at 8PM as we're awake and still watching telly. His arrival is heralded by a loud bang which we later realise was him kicking over our wheelie bin in protest. He doesn't actually knock or ring, and perhaps doesn't understand the latest doorbell technology, again preferring instead to stand a foot or so away from our door and shout at it. Mostly it's about his missing son, the six-year old, the one presently in the care of Shooty's mother and grandmother. They all moved out about a month ago, unable to deal with him, and are still waiting for him to be carted off before they come back.

I catch Shooty's eye through the window and do the what the fuck, dude? gesture. The thing is, I'm somehow not actually scared of him even though I probably should be. Face to face he seems idiotic, even pathetic, regardless of the reputation.

'Fuck you!' he screams with real feeling and gives me the finger before wandering off. He thinks we've kidnapped his kid, or we've been badmouthing his kid, or we've given his kid to aliens who are probing the child even as we speak. Nobody knows.

We call the cops, because when we called them this morning, they said to call them if it happened again, and it has happened again. They arrive after about fifteen minutes and explain to us how Shooty is not a well man and may be feeling confused and upset right now, and we should definitely call them next time it happens.

Neighbours come out of their houses to share notes with us. Shooty has been dropping in for a loud one-way chat with everyone on the block, so it turns out. Someone actually saw him carrying an axe the previous night.

I've identified our boy as Shooty on the understanding that he shot and killed someone in his house five or six years ago but was never convicted because the cops were somehow unable to prove anything; or maybe they decided that they would definitely act if it happened again. However, it turns out that I am in error and he merely stabbed someone and should therefore probably be identified as Stabby the Drug Dealer, but I'm sticking with Shooty, having thought of him as Shooty for most of his time in the stripey hole.

He was in the stripey hole for abuse of a senior, whatever that means. His rap sheet can be viewed online. No actual murder, and nothing sexual, but otherwise he's pretty much done the lot. Also interesting is that the rap sheet logs calls made every couple of days for the last two months, ever since Shooty came home - mostly nuisance and disturbances, but one of them involving a knife. I guess maybe the cops were waiting for a nice even number, like fifty.

Anyway, he's now binned up, presumably medicated, and his goldfish memory will hopefully have forgotten whatever he imagined we did by the time he comes back, which he hopefully won't.

Perhaps oddly, the detail I've found most depressing is his moronic territorial yapping because I've heard it too many times.

You'd better not be saying shit about this person or that person somehow associated with my good self, because you'll be amazed at the vigour of my righteous fury. You better not be saying shit about my hood. Don't you know I be from the southside?

This is drivel you come out with when you have nothing else going for you, when the sum total of your personality is an address and the fact of your continued existence; and so you have to jab your existence at other people like it's a stick with a cowpat on the end, and keep jabbing until they notice, because when they notice you, you become real.

It's exhausting.

Simon

It hasn't been a great week. It's been cold and I don't do well with the cold, which was one factor that eased my relocation to Texas. Christmas approaches with all the obligations of time spent in the company of persons whose company can be problematic. My wife is being messed about at her place of work. Carol died earlier in the week, and if I hadn't seen her in a couple of decades, it still felt rough even at such distance. Our neighbour has been whining about the cats again with his usual passive-aggressive charm, seemingly expecting me to tell him God knows what - maybe that I'd happily have them all put down rather than suffer another stray turd to be laid upon his beloved driveway; and Simon Morris is dead.

Simon was the vocalist and driving force of a group called the Ceramic Hobs. I first heard them at the tail end of the eighties, or possibly very early nineties - a couple of tracks someone had stuck on the end of a tape for me, and all I can remember was that they sounded like a bit of a racket. My initial impression wasn't great.

Around 1999, he sent a copy of Psychiatric Underground, the Ceramic Hobs first album, to the Sound Projector magazine with the words please feel free to give our CD a good slagging - we can handle it! I was writing reviews for the magazine at the time and Ed Pinsent, the editor, passed it on to me, suggesting that it seemed to be my sort of thing. I thought it sounded like a bit of a racket, but tried to write something positive:

It's certainly one of the more incoherent CDs I've come across. Tape collages are splattered across its twenty-eight tracks with all the ferocity of the pattern in the toilet bowl after a bout of swallie induced pebble-dashery. All mashed up with the tapes and a few techno inspired remixes is an assortment of occasionally tuneful punky numbers complete with gargled vocals, a drumkit being demolished, and a family of chimps at the mixing desk. They must've got through some PG Tips whilst this album was being made. Psychiatric Underground is like one of those kid's drawings of a circus where everything happens simultaneously, an interpretation which, if true to life, would mean that most circuses would last about five minutes.

Another stumbling block had been the association with Pumf Records, whom I recalled from the eighties back when I too had been involved in the whole DIY weirdy tapes by mail scene. To be fair, I hadn't actually heard any of their works, but had become jaded through a million flyers for Pumf products spilling from everything which came in the mail for a period of about a year. It had begun to feel like telemarketing; but then, I reasoned, there almost certainly would have been persons out there similarly weary of my own shittily photocopied self promotion. I swallowed my pride and struck up a correspondence with Stan of Pumf, and then also the Ceramic Hobs guitarist, reasoning that veterans of whatever it was that we both seemed to be veterans of should probably stick together.

Next came Straight Outta Rampton, the second Ceramic Hobs album, and the one where I finally felt I understood what the hell they were trying to do. The above description still applied, but somehow the random patterns had formed something weird and beautiful; and I suddenly felt guilty about having given Psychiatric Underground away and sent for a second copy; at which point Simon wrote to me to say thanks for the write up, but also:

It's weird to be writing to you really. In about 1983 when I was fourteen I used to correspond with Larry Peterson, and I distinctly remember a Do Easy flyer that he sent - that was you, wasn't it?

It was, and he told me that my writing was the best stuff in the Sound Projector - even though it clearly wasn't - which was nice, and we became pals. Musically speaking, I'd been working on the launch of my ill advised rap career, and it had occurred to me that it might be interesting were the impending CD to include a few voices other than my own. I'd heard Simon rap on tapes he'd recorded with Stan as Judge Mental and the Heavy Dread Beat - amongst other ludicrous names - and while his rapping was basic as fuck, it was also funny and made up for the shortfall with sheer anger. I sent him an instrumental and he sent me a vocal which I striped onto the four-track master without too much difficulty. Then I performed with the Ceramic Hobs when they played at the Garage in Islington, first time jumping on stage on the spur of the moment, and on the second occasion with more preparation. I think I may actually have thrown up on him on one of these two occasions, which is always a bonding experience. I doubt our collaboration made any difference to anyone's life, but they were fun, and we loosely kept in touch from that point on - despite my momentary emesis - through my moving to Texas, through the Ceramic Hobs splitting and then reforming in different configurations.

He suffered from schizophrenic episodes and mostly seemed to have it under control, but was mad by some definition - a term he embraced with punky enthusiasm - and was as such a square peg in a round hole world, as the best people tend to be. He was also fiercely intelligent and I found we agreed on most of the important stuff.

It's like he doesn't get the idea that all this arty music is just another form of showbiz, it's all product. I'm convinced of this so when people seem to swallow the false high/low culture divide it bugs me. The Ramones say more to me as art than Aphex Squarepusher laptop powerbook wank anyway.

As fellow graduates of a certain poorly defined thing, we knew a lot of the same people, same points of reference. When Robert Dellar, the Mad Pride activist who had arranged for the Ceramic Hobs to play at the Garage died at the end of 2016, I took it upon myself to produce some sort of anthology as either a tribute or an epitaph. The book was called Kiss of Life, and Simon's contribution was a letter explaining why he couldn't contribute.

My book from last year and the one out soon are full of death and obituaries. I feel like a fucking undertaker or something. I just can't face writing more stuff like that, not about Robert. Apologies again. You can use this paragraph if you like as an explanation of why I can't contribute - I am still much too upset basically.

I know the feeling.

More recently he urged me to get in touch with Philip Best of Consumer Electronics on the grounds of his having moved to Austin, just down the road from me, and arguably being another veteran of whatever the hell it had been when we were all much younger. Philip had been a member of Whitehouse so I was slightly terrified by the idea, but through Simon's persistent nagging I made the effort; and I'm glad I did because, as I now realise, Philip is one of the nicer - or at least less cunty - people I've met through association with noisy music, and he now runs Amphetamine Sulphate publishing which has been responsible for at least a couple of the greatest short novels I've ever read.

In addition to compiling the astonishing Black Pool Legacy, the double album which at last makes sense of the Ceramic Hobs sprawling body of work, Best also published three books by Simon, and I gather Simon had become a valued gate keeper and collaborator as editor of titles by Meg McCarville and others.

Then, just six months ago, while it would be absurd to suggest that we fell out, he pissed me off on facebook - although that hardly makes him unique. I made some comment about his beloved Electric Light Orchestra and he told me, get over yourself. I wouldn't have minded but the comment had been me taking the piss out of my own long-standing hatred of Jeff Lynne and all his infernal works, a joke amounting to here I am being a dick yet again; but he didn't seem to see the funny side and perhaps assumed I was simply being an actual dick. He suggested I would need to familiarise myself with one of their horrible songs in particular because I would be reading about it in Watching the Wheels, his forthcoming book from Amphetamine Sulphate.

That rather depends, I thought to myself, on whether I choose to buy your forthcoming book from Amphetamine Sulphate.

He'd also taken to posting status updates on what it's like to write books, what books should be, and so on, which I found a bit irritating. I unfollowed him and went off to think about that Nocturnal Emissions album I'd sent him as a freebie because I'd ended up with two copies. We hadn't fallen out, but it's always good to take a break, and I'd reconnect in a few months once he'd moved past delivering edicts and I'd grudgingly read Watching the Wheels, as we both knew I would. It was probably silly, but so is existence.

I vaguely followed his goings on through others. He came to read in Los Angeles at an Amphetamine Sulphate evening, and it was nice to know he was doing well and already had another book in the works.

Then about two weeks ago, all of those mutual friends were suddenly worried at his having gone missing from his home in Blackpool. He'd vanished below the radar on a couple of previous occasions, deactivating social media accounts whilst getting his head together, and I assumed this would be the same; although it was a little worrying that the police were now involved in looking for him.

He'd show up.

He'd turn up and there would be some new novel spun from this latest psychological turnpike.

Just this morning my wife came in from her morning run and told me his body had been found.

Simon is no longer with us.

Gone.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

I wonder at the folly of falling out - or at least going silent running - over Jeff bloody Lynne, but not for long. It wouldn't have made much difference to anything, I don't think.

I dig out his old letters and postcards. I listen to Black Pool Legacy and realise we really have lost one of the good 'uns, which likewise doesn't come as a surprise. I always knew it.

He was one of those people who made things interesting, who caused good things to happen, whose art - even with the bleakest and blackest of subjects under the microscope - could not help but sound optimistic, hopeful, even funny by some mechanism I couldn't even begin to understand. He struggled but he always seemed to come through. He made things better.

I will miss him.

Nausea

Texas is hot at this time of year, and it's difficult to appreciate quite what that means until you've lived in it. As with anything, just visiting is something different. Back in England, I'd fallen into the habit of spending most of October dreading the approach of winter, followed by several months of freezing wet misery and darkness, and most of that time spent working outdoors in close proximity to the freezing wet misery and darkness. Do I really want to move to a country which won't oblige me to spend six months of each year thinking about topping myself whilst shivering and waiting for my socks to dry? was never a question I had to think about at any great length.

I moved, assuming that it would be the end of weather-induced melancholia for me; but instead the calendar simply swapped around, so now it's July and August which are the toughest months. The heat soars to such extremes that I'm obliged to get all outdoor activity done before midday - shopping, gardening, cycling or whatever - then take shelter inside with the AC turned up full in every room. It isn't quite a symmetrical inversion of how much I once dreaded winter, because it doesn't last so long and I'd rather be too hot than too cold, but it can still be an endurance test, a period of time during which you just have to keep on going until it's done and you can breath again; and it is unfortunately during such times that I tend to notice other reasons to be less than cheerful, and as the days get hotter and the soil turns to dust, it becomes more and more difficult to keep going forward.

I am not an inherently happy individual. I experience happiness but it isn't my natural state of being, because that which makes me happy is by definition fleeting and impermanent, and the world is full of depressing shit, and depressing shit tends to be eternal and enduring.

Rather than happiness, I aspire to contentment, which is simply purpose combined with the absence of depressing shit - either because I don't know about the depressing shit, or because I'm ignoring it for the sake of maintaining my sanity. This usually just means I'm ignoring facebook. Most of the time I maintain a general sense of contentment because on the whole I'm exceptionally lucky in terms of my lot; and certain things season my contentment with happiness: my wife and our home, decent food, the wilderness around San Antonio, books and music and cats...

I'm not even sure how many we have these days.

There are seven cats inside, and an indeterminate number of strays which I also feed in the mornings - five at present. They sit in the yard casting a meaningful gaze at the back door when I get up in the morning, each one waiting to be fed. A couple of them have become so tame that it's difficult to keep myself from thinking of them as our cats, as part of our extended family; although the rest are undeniably feral. They seem pleased to see me, but they keep their distance.

It is August. The heat is punishing, shifting up into three figures on some days. The creek has dried, no water anywhere, and facebook idiocy has left me wishing to sever almost all ties with the rest of the human race - which happens with some frequency - and on top of it all, Mr. Kirby has gone missing.

Mr. Kirby is one of the feral cats, almost family, but not quite.

We have a female cat called Kirby who went missing on the same day that Paul Ebbs - celebrated author of children's drama serials - cracked facebook jokes about teaching cats to swim by placing them in sacks with housebricks before throwing them into a body of water. It transpired that people liking all the stuff he doesn't like on social media - specifically people posting pictures of cats - was quite literally destroying his life, so you can see why he would be angry.

I defriended Paul Ebbs and went out to look for Kirby. She was missing for nearly three weeks, and each time my wife and I went looking we thought we'd found her, but it always turned out to be a male cat with similar markings, one of the local strays. We knew he was a male cat due to his massive furry bollocks, and so we provisionally named him Mr. Kirby for the sake of something to call him. The original Kirby eventually came back.

Mr. Kirby took to lounging around in our back yard, hoovering up the food that our own cats couldn't be bothered to finish. Eventually I started buying food for the outside cats too, because if we're to live in a neighbourhood full of strays, as we do, they may as well be well-fed, relatively healthy strays. Of course, as the sage Paul Ebbs has taught us, not everyone likes cats; but thankfully most of our neighbours do, and Stephen from across the road told me how the street used to have a real problem with rats and mice, which the presence of cats seems to have sorted out. Additionally, the local feline population appears to have stabilised, with all the females having been trapped, neutered, and released by city authorities.

I feel I've got to know Mr. Kirby reasonably well. He flinches a little whenever I stroke him, but he seems otherwise glad to see me. He's an odd-looking cat with a distinctive hooting meow, and sometimes I ask him whether he's a cat or a goose - because I talk to the cats, which is probably inevitable. He's long and skinny, grey with black stripes which turn to spots when he rolls over, suggesting that - like Kirby - he has some Bengal somewhere in his ancestry. He also has certain Siamese characteristics, the slim muscular build and that meow. He's built like a lollipop - a long, thin body with a massive head - and the slant of his eyes makes it seem as though he views us with suspicion or even disdain. Sometimes when I see Mr. Kirby, the words come to me: I don't want that boy in the house again, he looks like a sheep-killing dog, which is supposedly what some person's conservative father said of the youthful William S. Burroughs.

It's been three days since I've seen Mr. Kirby. Ordinarily he's outside the back door waiting to be fed with the rest of them every morning. Cats disappear from time to time, then show up again a week later because that's what cats do, and this is particularly true of strays. Well-meaning people take them in, or they get trapped in someone's garage, or maybe they just go wandering. Sometimes it'll be a road accident, but thankfully that doesn't seem to happen so often as you might expect. Even so, Mr. Kirby seems like an old cat, so I can't help but be concerned.

He comes back on the Monday, but something is wrong with him. He's noticably thin - suggesting the aforementioned garage scenario - and he's hungry, but he isn't eating. He puts his face into the bowl of food but that's all, then moves on to the next bowl of food as I dish it up as though this helping of the exact same thing will be more to his liking. He's not eating, he's not drinking, and his muzzle and front paws are all messed up. I can't tell if it's dried blood or just dirt, like he's had to tunnel his way out from somewhere; and he coughs as though trying to sick something up, and his tongue sticks out even with his mouth closed.

Truthfully, Mr. Kirby seems prone to such injuries. Every few months he'll show up with a crippling limp looking as though he's been in a fight, but he always recovers. He's like the cat equivalent of a retired superhero, old and a bit fucked but he could still kick your ass.

This, on the other hand, is something different. He isn't drinking. He isn't cleaning himself. He sits out in the porch as the August heat climbs and climbs. I wonder if he was hit by a car and broke his jaw, or whether he has some sort of bronchial infection, or - as my wife suggests - a cold. She has known cats to catch their equivalent of a cold and to not eat or drink for days as a result. It could be that he was stung in the mouth, given that we have some genuinely terrifying wasps in Texas. My fear is that he's having problems with his teeth, and something has gone bad and has become infected.

It could be any of these or none of them, and each diagnosis seems to bring some other symptom to disprove it. For a couple of days he doesn't eat or drink so far as we can tell, although clearly he wants to, and so my wife makes plans to get him to the vet. It's not an easy choice because the vet is always expensive, and we can't save every single stray in the neighbourhood, and more than anything we're afraid that the vet will take one look at Mr. Kirby and decide that there isn't much point to keeping this sheep-killing dog of a stray cat alive.

My wife has the cat box, so I find Mr. Kirby and pick him up. I'm not convinced he's had food or water for three days, and his face seems to be swelling up on one side, yet somehow he's still stronger than most humans. I've never picked him up before, so I never realised that he was solid muscle. He doesn't want to go in the cat box, and I can't hold him. It's like I'm in a fight with some bloke in a pub car park. He runs, out the porch door and to the fence. We go after him, but he's through into Frasier's garden leaving me just one last reproachful backwards glance.

Why you do this?

The next day is so hot that water catches fire as it comes from the hose. The air is still and it burns my skin and I feel terrible. Mr. Kirby didn't show when I fed the other cats at the usual time, so it's probably the last we've seen of him. Whatever was wrong didn't seem like something which is just going to right itself, so he's probably crawled off to find somewhere to die. I look around but I can't find him, and I can't see him from over the fence. I don't bother going out today because it's far too hot. At one point I lay on the bed and experience a vision, one of those quirks of memory or thought or something where an image flashes momentarily into the mind's eye, clear as day for a fraction of a second.

I see the front room at the basement flat in Lordship Lane, the place I lived for a decade up until about 2007. It's the front room as I knew it in the early afternoon following a customarily exhausting morning at work. I'm be prone on the sofa, aching and barely able to move with the gas fire on, but the room is still so cold that I can see my breath. The winter sun is blinding through the net curtains, although it has barely risen above the roofs of the houses across the street. My entire existence is saturated with the knowledge that life is exhausting, and that I'm barely getting by, and it will only become more exhausting and more difficult as I go on. This is a horrible thing to remember right now.

In the evening I knock on Frasier's door but there's no answer, so I let myself into his back garden on humanitarian grounds. I have the cat box but I'm expecting I'll probably just find a corpse. Frasier's garden is huge, wild, and strewn with junk, and my search comes with its own soundtrack of pitbulls snarling away in the next yard along. I don't find what I'm looking for. I suppose that's a good thing in so much as that we don't know he's dead for sure.

The next day, Mr. Kirby is back.

He still looks a bit fucked, but he's alive and meowing, even though the meow is more of a croak. I dish out the food but it's business as usual. He sniffs but doesn't eat, but we're just glad he's alive, and tonight we'll get him to the vet if it kills us. Then a few minutes later my wife calls me back to the porch to tell me that he's cleaning himself. I move a provisional bowl of food under his nose and slowly he begins to eat. It isn't much, but it's something. He spends the afternoon lounging in the hot sun, and we decide to postpone the visit to the vet, weighing how difficult he is to catch against the possibility that he definitely seems a little better.

The next day, he looks clean, he's hooting away, and he eats three bowls of food seemingly without pausing for breath. I return to my original theory of Mr. Kirby being more or less indestructible. Whatever was wrong with him - bad as it was - he got over it, just like William S. Burroughs - all those years as a heroin addict and the fucker still lives into his eighties. It occurs to me that maybe Mr. Kirby is William S. Burroughs reincarnated as a cat, which would also explain the look he sometimes gives us. I don't believe in reincarnation, but I expect William S. Burroughs did, which may be the deciding factor.

A couple of days later a storm system over Louisiana sends rain our way, and it pours for days. The creeks fill and the temperature falls to a more manageable level.

Life goes on.

The moment has passed.

Wah! Wah! It's So Unfair!

I was an awkward teenager, or at least I felt awkward. Whether my awkwardness was apparent to those around me was something I never discovered, and I lacked the apparatus to deduce what anyone thought of me at any given time; so mostly I assumed they regarded me as idiotic just to be on the safe side. I was occasionally clumsy, both physically and mentally. I often found myself lacking the words with which to express myself, which was probably for the best. Had I greater intellectual agility, I probably would have realised that I didn't actually have anything much worth expressing.

Myself and a few others formed a band when we were at school. We had a couple of instruments which we couldn't play very well, and we used cardboard boxes for drums. Every weekend we'd convene around a tape recorder to improvise scatological interpretations of children's television theme songs. I still have all of the tapes. Unsurprisingly they're not quite so funny as we thought them at the time, although some are funny for reasons other than those intended. Here's myself telling a joke at the end of one of these tapes, specifically Nine Inch Turd in the Cassette, my debut solo album recorded as the Post-War Busconductors;

There's this pig and er - hold on. Oh yeah. There's this pig- this farmer buys this pig and erm... at market one day, and he takes it home, and he's very proud of this pig and erm... gives it a bit of food and er... he's okay and then one day he catches this sort of disease and he's walking along eating this apple, and he walks past the pig sty, this farmer... and he's just finished it and he's got the core and he thinks ah the pig can have the core, I mean they eat anything don't they? So he throws it in and erm... you know the pig up until then, it hasn't had anything to eat because it hasn't been his feeding time yet and so erm... anyway he gives it this apple core and er... you know - later on he feeds it, and er... That night he goes to sleep. He has this funny dream. Then when he wakes up in the morning he thinks hey, that's funny - my alarm clock can't be right. It's still dark. And so he er... well, you know looks around, opens the window. Well he just manages to... press it open, and this smell of shit comes in. Oh God - it's horrible; and er... and he realises that all this is shit because incidentally this farm is in a valley - a really bad place for a farm, all the same and erm... so er... luckily the telephone is upstairs because you know the shit just comes up to the top of the stairs; and he phones up all these people and eventually they dig him out, and after a few months he slowly works out where all this shit is coming from. It's the pig, you see. It's caught this disease, and even if you give it a tiny little something - you know like erm... give it an orange slice or something. it does a massive great pile of shit - an average of one inch of food - one square inch of food to about ten square yards of shit, so you can imagine it's pretty bad...

To cut to the chase, the agriculturalist stops up the pig's anus with a cork and sells him to three African gentleman of differing heights - the traditional big one, normal-sized one, and little one of so many children's racist jokes - crucially neglecting to mention the creature's digestive issues. The three African gentlemen return to the jungle with their newly acquired pig, and to a sadly inevitable encounter with a representative of a species of Cork Pulling Monkey. The punchline, for what it may be worth, is you should have seen the monkey trying to put the cork back in.

It takes me over six minutes to tell the joke, and it just isn't that funny. The most depressing aspect of this is that, without access to either my diaries or the cassette tapes recorded by me and my friends, I would date this to when I was twelve or maybe thirteen, because that feels about right. The material transcribed above was recorded on Thursday the 1st of January, 1981, so I was fifteen, two thirds of a year short of turning sixteen. I'm not sure if it's simply that I was a late developer, or that I now have a disproportionate quantity of friends who had already read Plato's Republic by that age, but the fact stands that at the age of fifteen, I probably didn't have much going for me beyond some rudimentary aptitude for drawing pictures.

More recently, roughly half way through the nineties, I couldn't help but notice that as I approached thirty, I still suffered from a certain social ineptitude. I felt awkward around people almost regardless of whether they were friends or complete strangers. I was prone to stupid, melodramatic utterances, things which I thought might impress my peers yet which I would later recognise as idiotic; and I was hardly what you would describe as a hit with the chicks. I lacked confidence in some respects, and I suspect this was because on some level I was at least sufficiently intelligent as to have recognised my own limitations.

I experimented with blaming my parents, as I expect most people do at one point or another. They hadn't loved me, or had never said so out loud. Neither of them had ever hugged me, I reminded myself whilst ignoring the obvious point that we simply hadn't been that kind of family and we found such ostentatious demonstrations of affection awkward. They had separated and divorced when I was seventeen, leaving me traumatised, which was proven by my being unable to remember anything much of that year. It had been so horrible that I had forgotten all about it, just like all those guys who fought in 'Nam.

I told myself this stuff because it was as good an explanation as any, and it seemed in tune with the zeitgeist, Kurt Cobain and others issuing forth with primal screams lamenting that day the school bully had taken his milk and called him a gaylord. The problem was that it didn't ring true. I knew I'd had an average but generally decent childhood, perhaps not one speckled with gold stars of well done, Lawrence, but no-one had ever beaten me, and I never went hungry, and the old pee and em hadn't driven me over to Banbury and left me with Gary Glitter when they fancied a night out; and I knew that in the unlikely event of my ever becoming a father, my parenting would probably be of about the same standard as their's had been.

I have seen a psychotherapist, or at least a person with psychiatric training of some description, on three separate occasions. Each time the spectre of the dramatically bifurcating family life of my teenage years has been brought back as a possible source of delayed trauma. On one of these occasions I was invited to hug a massive Teddy whilst crying in order to let it all out, or something. I complied, miming the release of repressed emotions because I'd realised it would be easier than explaining that I really didn't feel anything about it, and all of this delving around in the supposed depths of my allegedly tortured subconscious was getting boring, even annoying.

Here's what I remember.

My parents were married. Occasionally they would have rows, but nothing overly dramatic or involving broken crockery. My mother didn't seem particularly happy, but there were things that made her happy. My father was the same, although I don't remember a whole lot of traditional father-son stuff because I don't think we really knew what to say to each other. I suspect he regarded me as being a bit weird, which is probably fair. I vaguely recall one incident of my going out to the garden to fetch something or other, slipping my feet into my mother's platform heeled sandals just for the sake of having something on my feet. I was wearing brass curtain rings on the fingers of one hand, four in all - one for each Beatle.

'Do you think he's all right?' I heard my father ask a few minutes later, clearly bewildered and probably envisioning my future life of casual homosexual encounters in an assortment of opium dens; and I remember this when I find myself inspired to ask similar questions of my stepson, who is presently twelve.

My mother took a degree in English literature, and then a job. I have the impression that something of an extra-marital nature may have occurred between herself and someone at her workplace during this time, an impression formed mainly from the contents of rows which began to flare up with unusual frequency as I was turning sixteen. One row seemed to refer directly to me, and I heard my mother lamenting that he just goes on and on and on all day and he won't shut up, which I found upsetting because I had assumed that she found our apparently-not-so-little talks fascinating. It upset me so much that my cries of anguish were heard from downstairs, and so my father came up to console me.

He talked about your mother and I, and I knew then that there was something seriously wrong because he was addressing me as though I were an adult, and that whatever was wrong wasn't just about me.

Then they separated, or specifically my mother vanished, and a couple of weeks later it turned out that she was renting a flat in Stratford-upon-Avon. She'd been unhappy for some time, and it was just one of those things. I lived alone in the house with my father for six months, and then moved away to live in a student house in Kent as I took a degree. He had seemed like a broken man, going to work, coming home, not saying much but just trying to get through to whatever came next.

More recently I discovered the diaries I kept at the time, but details referring to my parents' imploding marital situation are limited to occasional references to them rowing yet again, then the faintly acidic acknowledgment of occasions of my mother deigning to grace us with her presence in the immediate wake of the separation. Considering the reams of shitty portentous poetry I was inspired to write at that age, you might imagine some of it would refer to betrayal, generational disillusionment and so on, but no - it's mostly the torment of some girl at school failing to notice me, which was usually because I was still working up the courage to speak to her.

Contrary to my later yearning for something to blame, my parents' separation left little impression because it had occurred just as my small world was already experiencing upheaval, and because most of it had occurred off camera, expressing in details discovered after the fact. It left me with little reason to apportion blame because it really was just one of those things, a situation which became shitty simply because we aren't living in a perfect world, and a situation which resolved itself in a particular way because it had no other option; with the bottom line being that I probably would have done the same in any of the available roles.

We're all still alive, and all still talking to each other, and with no-one under any illusion regarding what actually happened, what hadn't been working right and so on; and so I suppose this means that for all of my incoherently idiotic qualities, for all of my development seemingly having been scheduled about five years short of my physical age, I was at least sharp in some respects, specifically in being unable to endure so much of my own bullshit as to rewrite circumstances and misfortune as unrequited trauma. If I was kind of slow, at least I understood some things, and knew uncomfortable truths to be preferable to appealing lies, if that doesn't sound too pompous.

So here, against all expectations and contrary to anything I could have predicted, here I am married and living in Texas with a stepson who is probably more or less as I was at the same age, give or take some small change. The more I dig into my own childhood, the better I seem to understand him, and the more I'm inclined to let it go when he talks rubbish or appears to behave in a selfish way.

I'm just making this stuff up as I go along, but it turns out that this is all any of us are doing, or have ever done. It's the best we can do, and usually it's enough.

Hustle

I'm in HEB, my local supermarket. I've just ridden twenty miles so my legs are aching. I've bought chicken stock and now I need milk. I'm at the chiller cabinet when she accosts me. She is small with bright blue eyes and reminds me of Pennsatucky from Orange is the New Black. She is animated, fidgety. She jumps up and down as she speaks, although this is almost certainly just how I remember the encounter.

'Can I talk to you?'

I am uncertain. 'Sure.'

'First I've got to ask you, are you old enough to vote and do you have a really cool job?'

What the fuck? I wonder. 'Well, I can't vote because I'm not a US citizen.' You would think she might have got this much from my accent, but never mind. I'm trying to work out what the hell is going on here. One of the store people walks straight past us so I assume this to be a legitimate enquiry by some definition. This person isn't just some crazy woman.

She seems excited. 'This is a challenge for me because I have public anxiety issues,' and she describes what sounds like some kind of therapy performed by inducing random strangers to conversation. 'What do you do for a job?'

She speaks with the cadence of someone conducting an interview, and it doesn't occur to me that I don't have to answer, or that I should tell her to piss off. 'I'm a writer. Well, I write novels. I mean it doesn't pay the rent but...' Already I'm making excuses when I'm under no obligation to say a fucking word. I see-saw back and forth between self-deprecation so as to avoid it sounding like I think I'm some big shot, and a sort of assertive pride: I write books, people I don't know have bought them, so fuck it - I am a writer.

'Have you ever spoken in public?'

'Yes I have.' I briefly recall the open mic events last year.

'Did you enjoy it?'

'It was okay.'

The conversation has thus far endured for mere seconds, but she talks fast. It's bewildering. This is her therapy, I decide, something to do with anxiety. I think this was what she said.

'Do you like to read?'

I would have thought that was obvious, given that I've just told her I'm a writer. 'Well, yes.'

'I'm going down under next year,' she says and describes some sort of competition or something she has won. It seems to relate to the therapy, possibly. 'Can you guess what I mean by that?'

'Down under?'

'Yes.'

'Are you going to Australia?'

She is pleased. 'You know, not many people get that one right. Someone guessed Mexico just now.'

'Mexico?'

'I know - I mean how is that down under?'

'Well, yeah.' Much later it occurs to me that she may have assumed me to be Australian, as some do. The accents apparently sound similar to Texan ears.

'Do you like to read magazines?'

She has thrust some sort of laminated promotional brochure at me, a brochure listing the kind of dull magazines you see on the news-stand - Beef Cook, Men's Trousers, Ladies' Hat Monthly. I realise that this is a sales pitch, or at least it suddenly feels like one, but her angle is bewildering to me.

'I read, but I don't really read magazines. Mostly I read books.'

She changes tack to sponsorship and it sounds like I'm about to be signed up for something. A few months ago I paid twenty dollars for a subscription to the local newspaper - something I have no real interest in reading - because it seemed like the easiest way to get rid of the guy who came to the door. I'm not going to be caught again, if that's what this is.

Now she's making some claim about sales of these magazines benefitting disadvantaged children. It sounds like horseshit but I'm stuck. 'Look I—'

'If you can't do that, well then just a cash donation, as little as—'

'I can't really afford this sort of thing.' I consider telling her that my wife and I are trying to buy our house and money is tight.

'It doesn't have to be much, as little as five dollars...'

'I could give you five pounds.' I still have English notes in my wallet, pictures of the Queen. The joke doesn't work, and I see I have a five dollar bill. I give her the five dollar bill. She carefully straightens it out and adds it to other bills kept in a small folder alongside the laminated brochure. It seems kind of professional, but I later remember that charity workers usually spend five minutes flashing all sorts of ID before they mug you.

'Thank you! You have a great day, you hear!,' and she's gone; and I am free; and I buy milk and cat food and make my way to the till. A minute later I see my little friend walk past accompanied by a partner, another woman. They look busy.

What the hell just happened, I wonder.

Friday Afternoon

It's Wednesday morning, still early and I'm wheeling out the bike in readiness for today's twenty miles. I'm feeling sort of pleased with myself because it's early, and here I am on the third day of the week and very much up for the distance ahead. Since adopting this regime five weeks ago, I somehow still haven't managed a full working week of twenty miles cycled each day. Something always gets in the way and it's usually me. One of the cats breaks down the bedroom door during the night, interrupting my sleep leaving me knackered and sluggish the next morning; or something on facebook pisses me off the evening before, necessitating that I have just a quick look first thing, and then I notice how I'm still sat there in my robe scrolling through pictures of kittens and it's almost noon.

This week will be different. I'm feeling so positive that I decide to make a minor adjustment to my gear thingy. My bike has twenty-one gears, the uppermost of which has been slipping for the past couple of weeks so it'll be nice to set that right, providing I can remember which screw I'm supposed to twizzle to make the adjustment. I twizzle and twizzle, and find myself doing a circle in the road at the front of the house in the highest gear, at last utilising the smallest cog of the assembly on my rear axle. Unfortunately my six lower gears now seem to be slipping - all of them, which is a bit weird. I twizzle again but I'm apparently now stuck with the highest gear. I make a closer inspection and notice how the cogs on the gear assembly of my rear axle now move independently of one another. I'm, pretty sure that isn't supposed to happen.

I have a quick look on the internet and encounter immediate frustration of the kind which can only be alleviated by extended swearing on facebook:

This morning, attempting to solve the mystery of my being unable to get into seventh gear on my bicycle for the last few weeks (or twenty-first gear, I suppose - technically speaking) I was bemused to find that the problem has escalated to the point that all of the cogs on the rear wheel (the thing is called a cassette apparently) now move independent of both each other and the wheel, meaning I can't use the bike at all. This in itself was annoying, but what has really pushed me over the edge has been my attempting to deduce what has happened by looking it up online, and it then taking twenty minutes before I could even get to the first clue due to the incomprehensible wall of jargon, videos in which mumbling tosspots explain if it needs a er um major adjustment then er um you er um turn it right around er um, however if erm the adjustment seems er the adjustment you require isn't er um so much then er um er you should only turn it a er um a little way, instructions informing me that the locking ring should be on the edge of the axle (not the end, like we would say in English) and that I need to adjust the splines, and there is no such fucking word. Splines were the aliens in one of those Stephen Baxter books, not something you find on a @#$%$#^&#$ bike. I came fairly close to shooting someone with my gun* due to the intense levels of frustration. Argh etc. etc.

Writing this out makes me feel better, and by this point I accept that I will have to pay a visit to Performance Bike. I can't even tell what's wrong or what has happened, so the likelihood of my being able to fix it myself seems minimal.

Bess arrives home. We sling the bike on the rack and drive out to the store. It turns out that I have a gear missing, just like in A Scanner Darkly. I have only six cogs in the set on my rear wheel.

Read that again if you need to.

The bicycle repairman shows me the wheel, and I count. I have just six cogs, suggesting improbable scenarios in which the seventh cog has been stolen by an avant-garde burglar, or removed by aliens for reasons only they will ever understand, or has simply ceased to exist due to the structure of reality having been founded upon our continued belief in the same, and in my case, in the seventh cog.

'I'll see if we can order a replacement,' bicycle repairman tells me, ' but it might take a couple of days.'

'Sure,' I say, still dazed. 'That would be great.'

Later, as Bess and I return home, I begin to recover a vague memory of there having been some kind of crappy plastic collar on the rear axle between the wheel and the gears, something I had only really noticed when part of it snapped, requiring me to yank the rest of it away so as to prevent what was left catching on the frame as the wheel turned. The problem is that the memory is so inconsequential and vague that I can't be absolutely sure of it having happened. On the other hand, I have historically understood my bicycle to have seven gears on the rear wheel due entirely to the switchy thing mounted on the handle bars, the gizmo which lists gears one through to seven, the gizmo for which there is no actual name because it doesn't need one; and I've never actually counted the number of cogs on the rear axle, because why would I?; and suppose the vague crappy plastic collar incident actually happened - it would have left a gap in which the six remaining cogs could become loose. So according to the maths there is a possibility that all this time I've been riding an eighteen rather than twenty-one speed bicycle, as though my world has become a particularly unambitious episode of The Twilight Zone.

All that I know for sure is that once again I will fail to keep up my intended twenty miles a day for the duration of the week.

I spend most of Thursday sat on my arse.

I begin Friday with an attempt to mow a bit of lawn because it needs to be done and it's exercise, but the result resembles the sort of inexpert haircut that plagued so many kids at my school. It only pisses me off further and is simply knackering rather than exercisey. It's like I'm hacking away at the lawn rather than mowing it.

Okay, I decide, I've got things done but I really need to get some exercise today, and Bess suggested I might use her bike instead. It's a decent bike, but not the sort of thing on which you would want to cycle twenty miles. She has the seat far too low, and the highest gear is seven. I'm also motivated by a feeling of guilt that my wife's bike is somewhat neglected and might be suffering from depression. It was new when she bought it, and it's been ridden from time to time, but not as a regular arrangement. I pump the tyres up to a bewilderingly modest 40psi, as suggested on the rims, then I fill a bucket with soapy water and clean off the accumulated grime until it looks bright and new once more, but for a faint suggestion of rust in the usual places; and then I take it out on the road. I get around the corner so far as Ginger Lane and turn back.

How the hell does she ride this thing? I come close to smacking myself in the face with a kneecap each time I pedal.

I fetch the wrench from my art supplies box, the one I use to open tubes of paint because Windsor & Newton acrylic paint is now sealed with hexagonal caps which can only be opened by robot artists. I use the wrench to raise the seat on my wife's bicycle by about two feet.

Cycling becomes much easier, although it's still no substitute for my own bike. I struggle up the hill of Byrnes Drive, then turn right at North Vandiver into the eastern reach of Alamo Heights. It's entirely suburban, just a criss-cross of quiet roads and no hills to speak of. I have a vague plan of just cycling around until I consider myself exercised. Ordinarily I would head off in the other direction and follow the Tobin Trail along Salado Creek towards McAllister Park, but it seems a little rugged for this bike. Once I'm exercised, I'll pass by HEB, the local supermarket, and pick up whatever I'm going to be cooking tonight for our dinner.

I enter Alamo Heights, a neighbourhood much like my own but for cleaner houses with lawns cut by better mowers. The streets here are named Greenwich and Kenilworth, amongst other things, which has always struck me as peculiar, given that I've lived in close proximity to both English places from which their names are taken. It occurs to me that if I keep on going in the same direction, I can shop at the North New Braunfels branch of HEB, which was sort of my first HEB. A change is as good as a rest.

I buy potatoes, tins of cat food, instant coffee, sugar, milk, tonic water, broccoli, pork chops, and some stuff with which to clean rust from my wife's bike. I also notice kumquats on sale, significant only because Bess and I were talking about kumquats the other evening. Frasier, our next door neighbour, has a tree full of the things, but those are the kumquats which resemble tiny peaches. Bess has told me there is another kind with skin more like that of an orange. This is the kind they have here in HEB, about the size of large grapes as they tend to be, and to my eyes they look like oranges for action figures.

I buy all my shit and just about get it stuffed into my backpack without too much grunting, and then I head back into Alamo Heights in the general direction of home.

When I first came to Texas, Bess was living in a flat on Emporia Boulevard, just one block from Greenwich. We only lived there for a couple of weeks before we moved to our present location, but the time seems much longer because I was in a different country, and everything seemed vivid and strange. My first experience of buying mundane crap such as scouring pads and margarine was in the HEB from which I've just come, and it felt different to buying such things whilst on holiday in a foreign country, although it's hard to say why. This square mile of suburban sprawl, of neatly tailored lawns, mesquite trees, and lone star flags, was my first experience of America as a place in which I was living rather than simply visiting. Now as then, it has a certain sparkle or promise by virtue of bearing no resemblance to any place I knew whilst growing up. Everything is alien and yet suggests familiarity, if not specifically to me. The sky is as blue as in the Peter and Jane books I read at infants school, and the houses are just as ordered and tidy even if the architecture is different.

Five years later, it still strikes me as peculiar that I should have come to live here, a sensation strongly reinforcing the idea that all this time I have been watching a film of my own life; although in case it isn't obvious, I very much like where it has gone. Alamo Heights reminds me of the strange blend of excitement and discomfort I experienced when I first came here. Contrary to the predictions of some, not once did it occur to me that I had made a decision I would regret, but I ached for the awful novelty to be experienced, processed and done with. I longed for the place to become familiar so that I would no longer have to think about it, and would be able to start living; which is thankfully what happened.

There are a million stories in the big city, and I suppose this was one of them, give or take some small change.

*: This is an allegorical statement and should not be taken as indicative of potentially violent or criminal behaviour, particularly seeing as the only guns to which I have access are Junior's collection of water pistols.

Bad Day

The bad day began online, as is often the case, specifically with an email notification pertaining to a new post on Next Door - a social networking site designed to fill in for the role of neighbours actually talking to one another as they once did. Most of the time Next Door will be someone looking for a new home for some bit of old furniture, or offering a lawn mowing service, but recent postings have been rendered increasingly exhausting by our local gun nut whining about liberals, or Obama's plan to take away our guns, or the hypothetical presence of ISIS cells in the neighbourhood. So, having signed up I've tended to ignore the actual website, relying on either email notifications or my wife - who is now also a member - to keep me informed in the event of there being anything I really need to know. The email notification which heralded the approach of my bad day pertained to a thread headed Cat Killed in Wilshire Terrace, and which opened with the suggestion that I probably shouldn't read what followed if easily upset, and so I didn't.

I've been down that road before with the kind of email notifications you receive on a daily basis if you've ever signed an online petition to ban this, stop that, or to bring an end to such and such. This petition called for the prosecution of individuals who had posted a video clip of animal cruelty undertaken for kicks on YouTube. I won't describe what had been filmed, but the email provided a link to the offending YouTube clip, and by association an image and a description of what I would see should I follow the link. The act of cruelty had involved a cat and had been filmed for the purpose of entertaining the sort of cunts who would find such a thing entertaining; and given that the reason such cunts would even bother posting such a thing on YouTube seemed most likely be so as to upset people such as myself, then it bothered me how the petition site had effectively done their job for them, even without my watching the thing. Hence I do my best to avoid anything I'm likely to find upsetting beyond the limits of my distress serving some purpose.

We have a number of cats, and as I work from home I spend more time amongst cats than amongst humans, so it would be fair to say that I have a lot of time for cats. Unfortunately this often seems to place me in opposition to a certain section of the online community, namely those who use facebook principally to mount a protest against people posting pictures of cats on facebook. I can understand up to a point in so much as that I find the children's television show Doctor Who annoying and headachey, and there tends to be a lot of Doctor Who in my daily facebook feed; but being an adult I am able to reason that if something brings happiness to a person without involving others being marched off to the gas chambers, then that has to be a good thing. Generally I would hope others might be able to take the same view of those who, like myself, happen to like cats. Most do, but then there are persons like the facebook connection I made on the grounds of my having enjoyed his novel and that we know a load of the same people. His posts hilariously described facebook as catbook and suggested that the love of cats demonstrated by others was quite literally ruining his life. Our love of cats was making his existence a living hell!

Stuck in Guantanamo Bay, blindfolded and having a lamb korma pumped up your arse, or noticing that a facebook acquaintance has shared a photograph of their cat - same fucking thing, my friend, same fucking thing.

Then, on the day that Kirby - one of our own cats - went missing, an unrelated Google search brought me the appalling news of domestic cats having been found dead following probable torture by a psychopath three or four miles from our house; and this was immediately followed by the important novelist's side-splitting facebook post proposing swimming lessons for cats using the brick and sack method.

Ha ha.

I defriended the shit BBC medical-drama scriptwriting cunt, and have done my best to try to learn something from the experience, which is why I now chose not to read Cat Killed in Wilshire Terrace.

The day was okay for the most part. I cycled twenty miles as part of my new daily exercise regime, wrote the usual bollocks, and then mowed some lawn. Our garden at the back is enormous and so I tend to mow it in sections, one quarter of the whole area each day using a reel mower - that is to say one powered by myself - because I knackered the electric one last year. The temperature differential between Texas summer and winter is such as to necessitate two kinds of grass grown on a lawn. Bermuda grass thrives during the hottest time of the year, then dies away around November to be replaced by rye grass, which itself dies away when the Bermuda grass returns in spring. The cycle more or less looks after itself, the only significant problem being just how thick rye grass will grow in a very short space of time, even after what is only a light rain. It was rye grass with which I knackered our electric lawnmower, because when it gets thick, I may as well be trying to mow a lawn of rubber tubing.

My day began to turn bad as I now attempted to mow another quarter of lawn in the back garden. Rain the previous week had set my regular schedule behind by a couple of days in addition to bringing the rye grass up thicker than ever. I pushed the mower into the growth, then brought it back, then forward again, over and over across the same patch. It was like hacking away, like cutting someone's hair with a kitchen knife. The blades clogged with thick green wads, the wheels seized up, and the grass didn't even seem cut so much as crudely levelled; and although I'd opted for the reel mower on the grounds of its use constituting exercise, this was exhausting and far more work than seemed fair. It took me about forty minutes to make a lousy job of what would have taken ten minutes in summer. The work left me pissed off and rudely aware of our garden growing faster than my ability to keep it all in check. I'd finished weeding the cactus patch a week before, and it had returned to its overgrown state even before I could get back to work on borders I hadn't touched in over a year.

I could feel depression settling over me as it does from time to time, without warning, often even without any coherent reason. The term depression may be misleading, but it's the best I have. I've suffered on previous occasions, and have been given a medical diagnosis of my thankfully infrequent darker moods as something other than just feeling a bit pissed off. I once wondered if it might be hereditary given my grandfather's episodes of clinical depression, although being realistic, he was almost certainly suffering from post-traumatic stress following service in the second world war.

To get things in perspective, my circumstances were once substantially more miserable than they are at present. Specifically there's nothing about my present circumstances which could be described as miserable, or even unfortunate. I have no real cause for complaint, and so I suppose I must have some perverse subconscious need to arrange for my own discomfort from time to time. I find myself pissed off by things which don't matter and which have no long term consequences, unfortunate or otherwise.

I've mowed the lawn and now Bess comes home in something of a state. She too has received the email notification for Cat Killed in Wilshire Terrace, but she's read it and is upset. I tell her I don't want to know, and try not to think of what I read when Kirby went missing, what was done to those cats over by Windcrest, or wherever it was.

'The signs are all around on the trees and telephone polls,' Bess tells me.

Cats being mutilated in this area, they read. Beware!

I've already tried to rationalise some of the horrible possibilities. The cat was found on Bradshaw, about a mile away from us, maybe a little more. That places it in the vicinity of Catman's house. Catman is either the local crazy guy, or the local guy who just happens to live on welfare, likes cats and could maybe stand to take more care of his yard, depending on how you look at it. I would guess him to be about late fifties. He's tall and scrawny with straggly hair and a huge white beard. His clothes seem lived in and he pongs a little, but I've spoken to him in the local supermarket from time to time, and he's a nice if slightly intense guy. His yard on the other hand is a mess. It isn't that it's full of rubbish so much as that it is left wild and untended even by the variable standards of our slightly crappy neighbourhood, and there's a six-foot pyramid of discarded cat food tins at the back of the house accounting for why the garden is always full of cats. We don't know if they're his cats or just local strays that he feeds. Each time we pass either Bess or myself will submit an involuntary wave at the place and coo, 'Hey, Catman!' in the vein of Earl Hickey greeting Darnell Turner in an episode of My Name is Earl.

Catman lives one block down from the street on which the mutilated body of a cat was found. I know not everyone likes cats. I can easily imagine that a person who doesn't like cats might be prone to dark thoughts if they lived near Catman, within view of the pyramid. Additionally, it's presently spring break which is historically a time when retarded deeds tend to be done with greater frequency due to those responsible being at liberty rather than at school. Given the presence within our neighbourhood of at least one gun nut who worries he might be sharing his road with an ISIS cell, I can easily imagine someone young and morally stunted electing to take a stand against Catman by hurting one of his cats with the added bonus of terrifying the shit out of the rest of us. This is what I've been telling myself, that it might be a vendetta waged against one particular person rather than cats as a species. I tell Bess, but it doesn't really bring much comfort.

It's six in the evening so I cook the dinner - chicken in walnut sauce. I usually serve it with potatoes done in a certain Mexican style with bacon and coriander, but as we're both trying to cut down on the carbohydrates, I've done cauliflower as well as potatoes; but there's too much material for the one pan, and cauliflower florets fall to the floor as I mix in the seasoning. The pans, of which there are three presently on the cooker, have become too hot to pick up without an oven glove, and somehow I now have too little space in which to put anything down. I'm getting more and more stressed as food I've prepared spills from pans onto the tiled work surface and down into the cracks.

'Fuck!' I pick a stray cauliflower floret from the floor, step outside and hurl it against the frame of the porch to teach it a lesson.

Dinner is eventually served but somehow it doesn't taste so great to me, despite which I eat too much, or at least enough to leave myself in some discomfort. Bess thinks it tastes fine, so I suppose that's something.

After dinner we drive to the Methodist Hospital to visit Myra. She fell at the weekend, fracturing the bone down the left side of her face and jaw. They've operated and she has four metal plates and twenty screws in her skull. She looks a state. We're all relieved, but I can't stop thinking on what a shitty world it is that such a thing as this could have happened to the woman.

We return home, and more and more I feel like buying cigarettes, when I haven't smoked or even felt the urge in a long time. I feel numb. I feel like going to sleep for a year or two. The world seems cold and cruel and joyless. There is no prospect for anything good ever again.

Of course I recognise the feelings for what they are, none of which makes any difference to the fact of my experiencing them.

The signs are still up. Cats being mutilated in this area. Beware!

Bess and I bring all of the cats inside, except we can't find either Snowy or Kirby and have to hope they will remain in some place where a roving nocturnal lunatic is unlikely to find them. Keep your cats in at night, was the thrust of Cat Killed in Wilshire Terrace on Next Door, so we're doing what we can, not least because further dismembered bodies have been found in the same area. A few of our cats tend to remain inside at night anyway, but the others are accustomed to staying outside and are clearly pissed off with this change to the established routine.

Holly is in our bedroom. Ordinarily I would put her out in the hall and wedge the door shut with the doorstop so as to prevent her waking us up in the middle of the night, but tonight I can't be bothered. I'm past caring and I feel protective towards all of them because they're my family.

I just want it to stop.

I pop an Oxycodone I have left over from harrowing dental treatment some years earlier and look forward to the cotton wool effect. It's not something I'm in the habit of doing but tonight feels like dangerous, unexplored territory.

After I turn out the light, Nibbler or one of the others manages to get our bedroom door open because the lock has never worked and the doorstop I purchased from Lowes a couple of years ago - the only one they had in stock - is crap; much like everything. In the darkness I can feel a tidal wave of cats washing into our room and taking their places on the bed with us.

I don't quite sleep, and both Nibbler and Holly wake me from whatever state of slumber I almost attain with kitty headbutts at different intervals. Enoch wanders around the house meowing his arse off like a little velvet fire alarm every thirty minutes or so, just as we knew he would, which is why he otherwise usually goes outside at night. I can't even be mad at them. I love these cats and would do almost anything to keep them safe. I just hope Snowy and Kirby are okay out there.

They are, and are at the door waiting to come in when I get up to feed them all around seven. So far as I can see there are no mutilated feline bodies on the front lawn.

Even before she is out of bed, Bess looks at Next Door on her iPhone. The police report is in, because this kind of animal cruelty is now a felony. The police report is adamant that the Bradshaw cats were killed by a coyote. It's horrible, but it's at least preferable to that which we've been fearing for the previous twelve hours. Coyotes are a rare sight within the city limits, but not unknown. I myself saw one down on Holbrook over a year ago.

The whole day suddenly looks different. In fact the whole world looks different, and somehow we came through. I can live with acts of God or nature or whatever you prefer to call it.

Intervention

Photograph courtesy of Michael Hall.

'What are you doing on Tuesday after work?' Marian asked.

'Nothing,' I said, hoping this was the right thing to say. 'Do you have something in mind?'

'My friend Richard needs a hand. We're taking a new fridge over to his house, and it would be great if you could help out. It wouldn't take very long.'

It was early on in my relationship with Marian, and her use of the term friend had not yet taken on the connotations it would later carry. With Marian, friends were not so much people with which you necessarily had anything in common as associates or colleagues, usually people she'd encountered on ISA self-improvement courses. She had friends outside of ISA she insisted, just friends she didn't see for years at a time and to whom she rarely spoke on the telephone.

She had tried to coax me into taking an ISA self-improvement course, but I resisted because I resented the implication that I required improvement by Marian's suspiciously ambiguous terms, and I was reluctant to shell out several hundred quid for something the nature of which Marian refused to describe because it would somehow destroy the magic. I had the impression that ISA was a cult, and this impression had been gleaned from, amongst other things, my phoning up the Cult Information Centre somewhere over in west London and asking them if they thought ISA were a cult.

'Yes,' the man said. 'ISA is a cult,' and he advised me to have as  little to do with them as possible. It struck me as good advice.

Tuesday came, as did Marian's friends in an estate car with a fridge in the back. It occurred to me that my assistance seemed not so crucial a detail as I had been led to believe given that there were three of them, including Marian, and they had already managed to get the fridge into the car so it probably wasn't going to be that big a deal at the other end; but I'd already said yes, and it wasn't going to take long.

True to form, Marian's friends were people she knew from numerous ISA courses. Nadia was a young black woman with a dry sense of humour. She was likeable and funny, and we got on fairly well; from which Marian presumably developed her theory that I have a thing for black women. My guess is that this is probably because I am able to talk to black women without first having to remind myself that they are just like you or I, but black, or whatever the hell it is that first goes through Marian's head when addressing those she would have regarded as inferiors until ISA taught her otherwise.

'I wouldn't have looked at you twice were it not for ISA,' she once told me in defence of the organisation. This was due to my being a mere postman, really no better than a common labourer. Apparently she was now able to see things differently, and it was all thanks to ISA. Had it not been for ISA, I would have been just some shit-thick manually labouring cunt so far as Marian was concerned.

'There are a lot of pictures of Karen here,' she scowled several years later, viewing the photographs I'd taken at the works Christmas drink. Only about six of us had turned up, Debbie, Geoff, Don, Karen, Rich, and myself. Karen was the black girl in the photographs.

'There are a lot more of Don,' I pointed out, 'and in case you're wondering, I don't fancy him either.'

Meanwhile back at Operation Fridge, we all piled into the car, Marian, Nadia, and myself. A person called Ian was driving, and I quickly realised that I hated this man almost more than anyone else I'd ever met in my life. He was a little older than me, past middle-aged and an ex-teacher. He had a broken, abrasive quality about him. He squinted from beneath failed Donald Trump hair with a wrinkled manatee face, and his lips were too large, pursed and acidic like those of an embittered old drag queen confronted with a poorly coordinated handbag. He punctuated his driving with occasional comic observations of a peculiarly joyless kind, like little cocktail sticks jabbed into your flesh. In conversation, his observations were made from the position of someone who knows something of which you yourself are clearly ignorant. It was not difficult to see how he had ended up on the self-help roundabout.

We drove through Brixton, and then Clapham, and then beyond. The three of them talked about ISA, but none of the good stuff forbidden to the ears of outsiders, nothing of what actually went on, just the sort of details I presume were calculated to draw me in.

'What is this again?' I would ask. 'I guess maybe I should give this workshop deal of yours a go.' Except I didn't, because they were children affecting nonchalance whilst discussing the new My Little Pony game, desperately hoping I'll ask them about it.

A new My Little Pony game you say? Tell me more!

The projected half hour was already forty-five minutes and we weren't even there. In fact an A-Z was being passed around, held at different angles in order that its secrets might be more easily divined. Being winter, it was already getting dark and the traffic was heavy. Richard, to whom we were taking the fridge, was their friend, but not so close that any of them actually knew where he lived. This enterprise was taking longer than promised, as tended to be the case when Marian was involved, this being Marian who would agree to meet you at two, turn up at four, and then tell you that you had meant four because when someone asks you to meet them at two, they really mean four. Everyone knows that.

Needless to say, there didn't seem to be much point in commenting upon this change to the terms and conditions, because she always had the small-print to hand.

She said this wasn't going to take very long.

But did I actually say we were going to be back home before nine in the evening, or did you just assume that, Lawrence, like you always do? or else it would be some testy remark about her inability to see into the future, which is why we didn't even have the conversation. It wasn't worth the trouble.

We arrived at Richard's place, evidently a bedsit in a much larger house, a great crumbling Edwardian mansion. It took a couple of minutes to get an answer. It seemed that Richard hadn't actually been expecting us and had been asleep. He emerged blinking like a sort of human mole, a slightly rounded head with hair cut short and a hunched figure. He seemed nervous, but glad to see us, or at least pleased to discover that the day held this particular element of the unexpected. He invited us in, albeit with some reluctance.

His room was at the top of a flight of steps, the way dimly lit by a light bulb somewhere way up near the cavernous ceiling. The place was quiet and damp. Year old newspapers, unpaid bills, and junk mail gathered dust on the lower steps of the staircase.

His rooms were small, just a bedroom with a kitchen at one end so far as I could see. It was stuffed full of books and CDs, and there was a computer and a bass guitar and musical equipment, but otherwise it was nightmarish, a nest made by somebody waiting for death. Newspapers, plastic carrier bags, anything that should have otherwise found its way to a dustbin was trodden flat into a grey carpet. Plates sat upon the floor, poking out from beneath the bed, the remains of whatever he'd been eating slowly calcifying like fossils. Only the computer looked clean.

In the kitchen, three or four inches of grey water sat in a sink which had apparently lost the will to drain, filthy plates lay within at hopeless angles. There was no smell, presumably because it was freezing cold and the only heat source I had noticed was a portable three bar electric fire.

I'd lived in some shitholes in my time, and visited much worse, but this was like nothing I had seen before. I was lost for words.

The three with which I had arrived were bustling around, inspecting the squalor, asking Richard if he thought it was okay to live this way. I felt suddenly uncomfortable, not least because I realised there was no point to our bringing a fridge up here into this room, so clearly something else was happening.

I was introduced to Richard as Marian and Nadia began to wrestle the shit from the floor into black plastic bags. So far as I knew I was just here to hump a large heavy object up a flight of stairs, but I'd noticed familiar titles on the bookcase and amongst those crumbling towers of media piled in the corners of the room, and so it seemed that Richard and I had something in common.

He told me a little about himself. He was about my age and had been in bands. He liked science-fiction. He reminded me of a few people I already knew, such were the common details, and we even seemed to have a couple of distant but nevertheless mutual friends. He wasn't quite a brother from another mother, but within minutes we found we got on so well that it seemed like I should already have known this guy in some capacity, or at least known of him.

It was difficult to square this slightly shy - although not cripplingly so - and undoubtedly amiable man with the conditions in which he'd been living, and the claim that he had not made exit from his own front door in about three weeks. He had problems, as I should have known, and he'd taken an ISA course in an attempt to address these problems. It didn't really look like a successful attempt from where I stood, but in any case this was how he knew Marian and the others. He told me a little of his problems, although I don't recall the details beyond divorce, estrangement from his own child, and a death somewhere in the equation. He was otherwise a regular, thoughtful guy who'd had a shitty break and was yet to fully come back from it.

This was an intervention.

'We look after each other in ISA,' Marian told me as she gathered chipped plates and cups from the floor. 'Isn't that the sort of thing you would be interested in?'

This was for my benefit as much as anything. We had come to bail Richard out, to wipe his arse for him, figuratively speaking. We were here to do that with which he no longer felt able to cope, because he was lost in his own behavioural spiral, sinking further and further into inertia. We were here on a mission.

Nevertheless I hadn't come to help, I had come to learn a lesson. This was so I could understand why Marian had been right all along.

I shuffled out into the kitchen and began to clear up, concentrating on the aspects of our visit which mattered, namely saving this poor fucker from himself. The rest I would worry about later. I managed to unblock the sink and then clean enough of the kitchen to begin washing the conveyor belt of plates and mugs and knives and forks coming from the other room. I gazed from the window as I washed, out across the damp squalor of ruined gardens and railway lines, but it was too dark to see anything.

Two or three hours passed, and the bedsit was ready to receive the new fridge. Whilst the place remained cramped and depressing, it was at least clean and fit for human habitation. Ian and myself humped the old fridge out into the overgrown garden ready for collection by the council, and then brought in the new one. Richard was close to tears. He seemed overwhelmed that anyone should have done this for him. It was getting on for seven in the evening, and this job of just half an hour had taken five. I had been lied to, and as a result I had spent nearly five hours in the company of one of the most acidic men I've ever met, and yet somehow none of it mattered because some good had come from the day.

Richard helped me move house a couple of years later - specifically helping me shift a couple of massive shelves - and although we never became close, it was good to hear about him from time to time, and to know that things seemed to be working out for him. I guess the intervention had occurred during one of his lowest periods. These days I see him on facebook as a remote presence. I avoid too much interaction because I don't know how he feels about his breakdown, or whatever it was, and I don't wish to stir things up. I don't know how he feels about ISA either. My take on them remains unchanged, regardless of good deeds done by their individual members, and I personally suspect that whatever strength brought Richard back from the edge was something he already had rather than something done for him by anyone else; and I could tell him all of this but I don't know if it would really help, or even that my views matter in this instance.

I still have nightmares involving Marian from time to time, and they really are nightmares - usually her passive-aggressiving me into some vaguely suicidal corner - so it's always nice to remind myself that some good came out of it, at least this one time.