A Fucked Up Life in Books (6 page)

And you’d probably think that my advice after this shit happening would be something like ‘always watch your drink, stay with people you know, etc etc.’

No.

My advice is that you should never go out, EVER. It’s full of dickheads out there.

I hardly speak to my Mum these days. The last ten years of our relationship has been shaky at best. Every so often she decides that she is going to be a ‘good mother’ by spending an absolute fuckload of money on me doing something of my choice. I reject those offers these days, but the last one that I accepted was a trip to London about seven years ago.

She asked me what I wanted to do. She had already booked a hotel in Russell Square so I just had to pick what to do in between checking in and checking out the next morning.

I chose to go to lunch, go to The National Gallery, eat some cake, go back to the hotel, go for a drink, go and watch
The Lion King
at the theatre then have some dinner and go to sleep.

My Mum wrinkled her nose at
The Lion King
, but she was surprisingly excited about the rest of my plans.

And so we went to London. We put our bags in our room and went to one of those cafés that are all over central London that have chairs and tables and ashtrays outside and the menus are laminated and sticky.

We ordered our food. The waitress asked us what we wanted to drink. My Mum turned to me:

‘Red or white, darling?’

So we’re having wine are we? Not even the option of a juice or a coffee
, I mentally noted.

‘Red.’

‘Fine. One bottle of red, one bottle of white. Thank you.’

Bottle?

The waitress went away with our order and I leant over the table to Mum, who had just lit up a Superkings Light.

‘Why are we getting a bottle each? It’s one o’clock in the afternoon.’

‘We’re on holiday, darling.’

‘We’re not on holiday, we’ve come for a trip to the theatre in London. 80 miles away from home. It’s not a fucking holiday.’

‘Hmmhmm …’ She sat thoughtfully blowing her cigarette smoke in my face.

‘I suppose not. I find it quite difficult to look at art sober though, don’t you?’

Actually I did. I shut up as the waitress uncorked our bottles, poured one glass from each bottle and then left.

Needless to say, after lunch I was absolutely battered. I wandered around The National Gallery gazing at the shit on the walls and feeling a bit frightened. It was all so big. My Mum had already had enough and was smoking outside, waiting for me. I went and joined her and we walked to another café, inhaled a slice of cake and a coffee each and then wandered back to the hotel room. I had a nap for an hour. When I woke up my Mum was sat by the window, smoking. As I’d left her.

We got ready and went to the theatre. We watched
The Lion King
. Mum enjoyed it more than I did. Then we came back to Russell Square and went into a bar near our hotel which was not too busy and still serving food.

‘Sit by the window, I’m going to the bar.’ I sat in a booth by the window, turning my head just in time to see the barman pushing two bottles of wine across the bar to my mum. One red, one white.

Fuck sake.

‘I got you …’ Mum peered at the bottle in her hand. ‘… red.’

‘Thanks.’

It took my Mum just an hour to finish her bottle. I still had half of mine left. She ordered another and began to talk to me in that way that I always used to dread.

‘You see, darling, your Father …’

I stopped her. ‘Not interested, Mum, don’t give a shit.’

‘Well, let me just tell you that he is a fucking cunt, then.’

There were a table of boys sat behind me. I turned around, and asked if they would mind if I sat with them. My Mum, realising that she’d fucked up another outing with me, mumbled that she was going to bed. And off she went.

I sat with these boys for a couple more hours and eventually, after not much persuading, went home with one. The fat one.

Have you ever had sex with a fat boy? Let me tell you about it. He was fat. I was thin. He was wide. I was not flexible. Straddling him made me feel like my cunt was ripping in half. He got tired quickly, I’d quite badly strained by legs trying to mount him, and at about 8am I decided to head back to the hotel.

Being a gentleman who wore tweed, he insisted on walking with me.

We went upstairs to the hotel room. Mum wasn’t there. She’s probably been out doing what I’d been out doing. Fucking hell.

Fat boy noticed the book that I had brought with me to pass the train journey –
Wizard’s First Rule
by Terry Goodkind. He laughed.

‘Goodness, I didn’t know that anyone reads this stuff! Look at the cover! My god, is it full of dragons and fairies and stuff? God, how awful!’

I fucking hate book snobs. I fucking hate people who think that one genre is for stupid people, or not worthy of their attention. I couldn’t believe it. I’d shagged a book snob. Only one way to regain some dignity.

‘You’re really fat,’ I said. ‘And I thought maybe you’d have a fat penis. But it’s really very small, isn’t it? And my fucking body hurts, and not because you fucked me properly, because I couldn’t manipulate it around your fucking mass of flab to get to your cock.’

He laughed nervously. He thought I was joking. Stupid twat. God I was tired.

My mum walked in. She asked him who he was, but she was looking at me.

‘He was sat on the table behind us yesterday. I went back to his last night.’

Mum seemed pleased. ‘Would you like to come for lunch with us?’

Fucking bitch.

‘NO, he would NOT like to come for lunch. Pack your things and let’s go, please.’

I said bye to the fat boy and we left London.

All the way home I read Wizard’s First Rule and marvelled at how much more a book could ‘fill me with’ than that fat boy’s horrible, scrawny penis.

Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule is:

People are stupid; they will believe a lie because they want to believe it’s true, or because they are afraid it’s true.

Each book in the
Sword of Truth
series has a Wizard’s Rule. Some are brilliant and some are shit. I love this one, it’s fucking fantastic, and it will always remind me of my sore legs on that trip back from London.

My Mum left my Dad to fuck a farmer. When she left she took all of her stuff and moved into the farmhouse with the farmer. She got cats and dogs and started wearing Hunter wellies, and she became a bit of a cunt, but you know about that anyway.

After she’d been with the farmer for a while and things weren’t going so well, she did the logical thing and took the girl dog 20 miles down the road to get fucked by a boy dog so that she could have puppies. Later Mum would say to me, ‘never have children to try and save a relationship. I did it with your Dad, I did it when I took the dog to get fucked and she had those fucking puppies.’

When the puppies were a couple of weeks old my Grandma and Grandad came to visit. My Mum’s always been pretty good at being ‘normal’ around people that aren’t me or my brother, and so it was quite nice and relaxed.

My Grandad went out with the farmer to go and shoot some animals. My Grandma and Mum and I sat in the kitchen and my Grandma pulled a plastic bag out of nowhere to give to me.

When I was little and Grandma would visit, she’d give me and my brother both a ‘lucky bag’. It was a plastic bag that had sweets and toys and books and other shit in. As we got older the bags had less stuff in, and what used to be Enid Blyton in my bag started turning into stuff that Grandma had picked up in the charity shop, read, and then passed on to me.

The book she’d given me this time was called
Liverpool Daisy
. Grandma said that she had really, really enjoyed it, and thought that I would too. I went into the Dog’s room (a room next to the kitchen with a lino floor and a dirty sofa) and sat on the sofa while the dog and the puppies slept in the ugly wooden fort-type thing that the farmer had built for them.

I started to read
Liverpool Daisy
. I can’t remember
exactly
what happens but I do remember that Daisy started fucking people for money to pay for her Mum’s medicine, and then when her Mum died, to pay for a new set of gnashers for herself. And Daisy didn’t stop there. She kept on whoring herself. In alleyways mostly. And I sat there with my mouth hanging open wanting to get up and go and smack Grandma one for reading such muck. And she was going to fucking ask me about it soon, wasn’t she? She was bound to come through and see me reading and ask what I thought and what in the name of almighty fuck was I supposed to do then?

‘Yes Grandma, it’s good. I like the gratuitous sex and I really enjoyed that smelly fucker who rammed her one in the alleyway and then jizz ran down her leg.’

Fuck. I had to put it away. Hide it away and she’ll never ask.

So I pushed it under the dirty dog-sofa and got up to wake all the puppies up to play.

I stood over the wooden nest-cum-fort thing and watched as the puppies latched onto the dog’s tits and sucked. They all looked pretty happy. The dog looked fucking miserable though, poor thing.

There were seven puppies altogether. All black, all girls. But only six were feeding. The other one was sat at the back away from the rest. That was a bit weird, I’d not seen them do that before.

I called Mum and Grandma through and pointed at the dog.

‘What’s wrong with the dog?’ I asked.

‘Nothing’s wrong with the dog,’ Mum said.

‘She’s just tired,’ Grandma said.

And we all stood and watched and then slowly but suddenly it dawned on us.

Mum bent down and put her face next to the puppy at the back for a few seconds, then quickly jumped back.

‘She’s not breathing. She’s not breathing. Is she dead?’

They both looked at me. I didn’t know.

‘Pick her up!
PICK HER UP!
’ they screamed at me.

So I leant down and picked up the puppy, and yes, it was cold and dead.

Mum and Grandma both started crying and screaming and hugging each other while I stood there wondering what to do next, with a dead dog in my hands.

‘She needs to be buried,’ they both decided after a few minutes, wiping tears from their eyes. They looked at me with red, serious faces.

‘You need to bury her.’

If there is one thing that you should never do it is argue with two women. Especially if one of the women is your Grandma and the other is your Mum who is prone to going fucking nuts and telling you that you were an accident. So I took the dead dog outside and went to the place where the farmer would bury the rabbits that the dogs had caught and killed and ripped apart. Grandma and Mum both screamed at me.

‘NO! NO SHE NEEDS TO GO IN THE TREES!’

So I turned around, with the dead dog in my hands and headed for the trees outside the front of the house. Grandma ran out with a tea towel and told me to wrap the dead dog in it.

‘Poor little thing, what a poor little thing,’ she said.

I didn’t say much. I was too busy looking for a shovel. I wrapped the dead dog up, picked up a shovel and began to dig a hole while the two women looked on. When the hole was deep enough I carefully put the dead dog in and began to cover it over. I patted down the soil and told them both that we should go inside. They were still crying. A lot.

‘Poppy,’ my Grandma said. ‘If I’d had one, I would’ve called her Poppy. Will you make her a little marker, a little cross, and paint “Poppy” on it?’

If it were my Mum asking me and not my Grandma I would’ve asked her if she was shitting me. But it was my Grandma and my Grandma was sad, so I went to the garage and nailed together two bits of wood that I found, then found some paint and painted on “Poppy” where the two pieces of wood met.

When I got back to the grave that I’d dug and put the dead dog in and filled back with soil they were still both stood there. I pushed the makeshift cross into the ground behind the mound of earth and stood back. And I told them now, we’re going inside.

We went into the house and I made them both tea. My Grandad and the farmer came back. I told them both that the dog was dead and that I’d been made to carry round the dead dog and then bury the dead dog. They went and sat with my Mum and Grandma and comforted them.

I went and sat back on the dirty sofa, the dog and six remaining puppies jumped up and sat on me and we all continued to read
Liverpool Daisy
.

I was in the city centre of my wonderful hometown, waiting to meet a friend for a pub lunch. Now, if you’ve ever met me you’ll know that I will NEVER be late to meet you. Always early. Sometimes an hour early. On this day I was an hour and fifteen minutes early.

So I wandered around for quite a while looking in shops until I decided that the best thing to do to pass the time would be go to a charity shop, buy a book and sit in the pub with a drink reading until my friend joined me. I went in to my favourite charity shop (British Heart Foundation) and found a battered little copy of
Towards Tomorrow
by Isaac Asimov for 95p. I bought it, walked over to the pub, ordered a bottle of beer and sat in the corner to read and wait for my friend.

After about ten minutes I became aware of someone watching me. I looked up and saw a man staring at me and my book from the next table. He came over.

Man: ‘Hello. I see that you are reading Asimov, do you enjoy it?’

Me: ‘Well, I’ve only read eight pages but yes, it is good so far.’

Man: ‘I learn English at the college. Are you English?’

Me: ‘Yes.’

Man: ‘I am Polish. My English is not good. You will teach me English.’

That wasn’t a question. He told me that I was going to teach him English. What the piss do you say to that?

Man: ‘You are … very beautiful. You have very beautiful eyes. You must be very clever.’

Oh, fucksticks.

Me: ‘Okay, I have to go now. I am meeting my boyfriend for lunch.’