A Fucked Up Life in Books (10 page)

This is why a lot of people starting travelling by the wonder known as the Megabus. The Megabus is like a train in that it travels between major cities, but is not like a train in that it is so cheap that you can buy a ticket to wherever you want to go without having to part with anything other than a small amount of money – in some cases as little as a quid.

I used to live in a pretty big city in the North of England and travel down to London fairly regularly. As I was a student and had almost no money, the Megabus was the sensible option for my travel.

I went to the bus station at stupid o’clock in the morning with my printed-out ticket in hand and boarded the bus. These buses are usually full to bursting, but every so often there are a few spaces. I sat down in a window seat and hoped that no one would sit next to me.

In my bag, as always, I was carrying a book for the journey.
Lolita
. A wonderful classic and probably one of my favourite books. I was about halfway through. I took it out of my bag, put my bag on the floor and laid
Lolita
on my lap while I waited for the rest of the passengers to get on and the bus to leave for London.

Two women got on the bus. They were loud and annoying. They were wearing bright, kind-of sporty clothes and were both caked in makeup. One was carrying a baby. The baby was crying. I knew that the one with the baby was going to sit in the seat next to me.

They were moving towards me, the baby still screaming, the women without the baby now talking about some wanker that she had given a blowjob because she was ‘on the blob’.

‘I’LL SIT HERE AND YOU CAN SIT THERE, YEAH? WHAT WAS YOU TALKING ABOUT BEFORE? OH YEAH, I LIKE THAT KIND OF MOOSIC, I LIKE ANY MOOSIC WIV A GOOD BEAT.’

She got out a phone and played something that sounded like a runaway train crossed with a factory explosion, with some cunt shouting ‘Yeah! Yeah!’ over the top. If I had a knife, I would’ve called my Dad, apologised, and ended it all there.

As I had predicted, the woman with the baby plonked herself down in the seat next to me. The baby stopped crying and started looking at me. I am not a fan of babies, so I ignored it and turned my head to the window. The bus doors closed and we were on our way.

The women were quite loud for another ten minutes. Then they both quieted down – must’ve been the exertion of being a complete pair of cunts that had made them so suddenly tired. I was still staring out of the window, keen not to look either of them in the eye lest I accidentally punched them.

I felt something hitting me in the shoulder. I turned round. The fucking baby was punching me. Its Mum looked at me and gave me an ‘isn’t that adorable’ look. I silently wished them both dead. Then, before I knew it, the fucking child had swept its awful little paw down to my lap and snatched my copy of
Lolita
. It held it in both its hands, a look of triumph on its face.

I looked to the Mum. She looked at the baby and the book. She took the book off the baby. I waited for her to hand it back to me.

‘Don’t take things off strangers!’ she told it, as if I’d fucking handed it to the little shit. Then, instead of giving it back to me, she turned it over and read the blurb. The look on her face turned to horror. She opened the book and began to read.

I didn’t know what to do, so like an idiot, I sat there with my mouth hanging open watching her reading my book. What kind of dick doesn’t give you your fucking book back? And now she was fucking
reading
it. What a cunt.

She probably read about four pages. Her eyes narrowed as she closed the book and then she turned round to her friend who was sitting on her left, across the aisle. She whispered to her and I leant forward in time to see her pass the book to her fucking friend who turned it over, read the blurb, and then opened the book for further examination.

I’d had enough.

‘Excuse me, please could I have my book back?' I enquired, but it wasn’t really a question. I stuck out my hand to receive it.

The friend passed it back to the Mum who held it for a moment and looked at me.

‘Are you some kind of perv?’ she asked.

I laughed. Then I looked at her. She wasn’t laughing. I thought for a split second about how much I fucking despise stupid people.

‘No, I’m not. That book is a classic. The author actually wrote it in English even though English wasn’t his first language.’

She looked at me like I’d shat in her cornflakes. She handed the book back, staring at me all the time. Then she turned to her friend and they began whispering.

I opened
Lolita
and started to read. The women were still whispering, every so often both turning to look at me. And then the Mum got up, took her baby and swapped seats with the other woman.

‘I don’t want no perv near my baby,’ she spat at me as she fell into the seat across the way and her mate sat down next to me shooting daggers through her eyes.

‘Fine.’ I sighed. I didn’t want to argue with these twats. As well as being so fucking ignorant that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, they also looked like the type who would rip your hair out and scratch your face off.

We travelled to London in silence. Me reading
Lolita
, the women taking it in turns to turn and look at me to check that I wasn’t masturbating or licking the window or whatever it was they thought I was into, and the baby reaching out about once every fifteen minutes to try and grab
Lolita
out of my hands.

Fucking pervert baby.

My housemate woke me up one morning by hammering on my bedroom door. After calling him a cunt because he would not shut up and fuck off I decided to open the door and see what he wanted.

I found him on the landing, washed and dressed and shouting at me to get washed and dressed too, he had a brilliant idea and he was not doing it alone.

He was one of these incredibly impulsive maniacs that you either love or hate. Luckily for him, I loved him, so washed and dressed myself and we got in his car. On the way to our destination he decided to tell me what was going on.

‘I had a dream last night …’ (a lot of these silly things started with this sentence) ‘… that I spent my last twenty quid in the world on buying the board game
Risk
and then we stayed up all night playing it. I’ve decided that I should spend my last twenty quid on a
Risk
set and that we are going to stay up all night playing it.’

‘Right,’ I said, ‘fine.’

We pulled up at Toys ‘R’ Us and my friend jumped out of the car and marched at quick pace into the shop and straight up to a sales assistant.

‘Where is
Risk
, please?’ he asked her, not one to fuck about. She pointed us in the direction of the board games and within ten minutes we had the game, had spent his last twenty quid on it and were back in the car driving home.

When we got home he took all of the pieces carefully from the box and set the kitchen table up ready to play. He phoned four more friends and told them to be here in an hour, and to bring rum.

An hour later and everyone was ready. There was rum and cigarettes and John Lee Hooker on the CD player. It felt right.

Now, I love
Risk
, but very quickly I got very bored. By the time it got to early evening and we were still all playing for world domination. The rest of the friends that I were playing with were boys. Not just any boys. Geek boys who had lived their whole lives up to this moment in preparation of such a game of tactics and endurance. Fuck, I was bored.

I took my next go and then went upstairs to get a book,
Smoke and Mirrors
. It seemed like the right choice, lovely short stories by a lovely man. The amount of time my friends were taking to decide what to do on their turns meant that I could probably get a story in between every one of my goes.

And so while the boys argued over the dice when it was thrown and landed ‘cocked’ between the table and the board as to whether it was a four or a three or a re-throw, I was ignoring them all and reading
Smoke and Mirrors
. And as the evening went on, one by one, my friends would take the book and have a read of one of the stories themselves and pass it round. The cigarettes became joints and soon rum, the dice, the book and the joint were all being passed round happily, as the game got slower and we got drunker and picked our favourite stories out.

It was probably about five in the morning when yellow won world domination and was all over. I went to bed and dreamt of masturbating into a clay gargoyle head and counting tiny plastic soldiers.

One of the boys I used to live with was a bigger reader than I was, and probably still is a bigger reader than I am. He lives far away now and I don’t know what his reading habits are because all of our conversations now start with ‘We never dance together any more, you and I …’ and end with ‘Well fuck YOU.’ Like all true friendships.

When I’d run out of books to read and I didn’t have any money to buy anything new from the charity shop down the road I’d wander up to his room and see what I could borrow from him. This was one of those days.

He was sitting on his bed reading and I told him that I needed something new to read and he told me to go ahead and take something. All of his books were stacked up on a really high shelf and so I stood on the edge of his bed and leaned over to claw them off and onto the floor before rummaging through them.

There sat
The Da Vinci Code
. It had been out a while and I hadn’t read it. I’d heard mixed reviews; one of my friends becoming so in love with it that he bought a special illustrated edition and would cradle it in his lap each night, one friend saying it was a bit of a page turner, and the friend that I wanted to borrow the book from who was still sat in his bed reading some epic fantasy, who had told me that it was shit.

I picked it up and waved it in the air.

‘I’m going to take this,’ I said.

Suddenly he was behind me. I don’t know how he’d moved so fast.

‘No you’re not,’ he said, and plucked the book from my outstretched hand. ‘It’s shit. It’s fucking dreadful. I’m not letting you waste your time with it. Pick something else. Here, take this book about the Kublai Khan.’ He swept down, grabbed the book and thrust it in my face.

‘I think I’ll take the other one. Thanks,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. He stood up. I’m very small. He is very tall. If he’d put the book on his head I’ve have had a hard time reaching it, but instead he held it right up in the air and stepped backwards.

‘It’s bollocks,’ he reiterated.

‘I’ll risk it,’ I replied.

He looked at me for a while, trying to work out what I was going to do next. I jumped up for the book but he saw it coming and moved away and I crashed into his desk.

‘MotherFUCKER,’ I mumbled. ‘Give me the fucking book.’

‘No,’ he said again. He held his hand out towards me, palm facing me until I stood still, and then while looking me in the eye he opened up the book, tore out a page, put it in his mouth, chewed and swallowed.

‘You can’t read it now, that was …’ he paused, looking down at the book ‘.. page ninety-seven. There is important information on page ninety-seven that will mean that you will not possibly understand the rest of the book. You can’t have it back because it is in my belly and later on I will shit it out, and unless you are going to break into the bathroom and go at my shit with a twig or a fork or whatever else you find then you won’t get it. Here. Take the book about the Kublai Khan.’

I took the book and backed out of the room, while he flung
The Da Vinci Code
under his desk and settled back down on his bed to finish what he was reading.

‘You’re a fucking headcase,’ I told him.

‘I have saved you a lot of time and effort,’ he replied.

He was probably right.

When the last Harry Potter book was due to be published I was so fucking ready. Having read the rest and been waiting for this one for what felt like forever I was incredibly excited to go and queue up with all the rest of the losers at Waterstones in the city centre to pick up my copy.

Being a sensible cunt, I had pre-ordered my copy six months in advance and had declined all social engagements from the day of publication up until two days afterwards, which would give me time to read the book twice.

If you were as excited about the book release as me, then you will know what an absolute twat it was to try and keep from hearing what happened in the final book. People were ringing up the radio saying things like ‘yeah I work in ASDA, innit, and we’ve got the books in the back yeah, and …’ and that’s as much as I heard because I’d destroyed the radio that the spoily bastard knobend’s voice was coming from, just to be completely safe.

So I had a brilliant plan for the queue. I’d borrow my friend’s iPod and listen to music really loudly until it was time to go in, at which point I’d switch off the iPod and start to piss my pants with anticipation.

Along came 11pm and I left the house, had a leisurely walk into town with the iPod in, picked up my ticket (number 308) and stood outside to wait. Ten minutes in the battery on the iPod told me that it was low. I called it a cunt and it promptly died on me, in my time of need.

Now I was with the rest of these dickheads, waiting to pick up my book and being subjected to the drunk students walking around the city centre.

‘HARRY POTTER’S A CUNT!’ shouted one in a girl wearing a Gryffindor scarf’s face. I’ll give him that one, I thought. Harry Potter
is
a bit of a cunt. But the rest of them, they’re fucking great. Professor McGonagal is the fucking epitome of brilliance and Professor Snape is one of the coolest, driest and darkest characters I’d seen in a long time. I loved him.

‘THAT HERMIONE BIRD’S FIT!’ screamed another at no one in particular. ‘SHE CAN RIDE ON MY WAND, FILTHY BITCH!’ Alright, I’ll let that one go too, I thought, thinking back to watching the Harry Potter films with my male friends where they’d play a drinking game to drink anytime they had any improper thoughts about Hermione.