Blog Story pt.1
There finally came a point where it seemed
I really had made the world go away. Not for long, I realised,
but for the time being anyway. New house, small but all mine,
many miles from the old life in London, no furniture beside the
bed, no cups or saucers, no mirrors or curtains, but mine all
mine. I would walk around running my hands over the walls,
caressing them, filling my nostrils with the smell of the newly
painted stair banisters. No one knew my new phone number yet
and those that did only ever got the machine anyway. Instead, I
would jump in the car and drive around, looking out at the cows
in the fields, unable to take it all in. Hills, trees, fields,
farms, places that sold free range eggs laid by actual hens.
Places with handwritten cardboard signs outside inviting you to
pick your own strawberries. I had never known this corner of
heaven before. To think there were people that had actually
been born into this, that had never known the backstreets of
Acton or Ealing, never climbed the fag-strewn backstairs of a
block of council flats looking for a place to hide amongst the
indoor smoke and half-empty bottles, the torn-faced junkies and
their dead-eyed girlfriends, the TVs showing Countdown or
Neighbours or whatever the fuck they showed during the
nighttimes of their days.
I looked out at them and wondered where I
was supposed to fit into all this, feeling a fraud, no
different though to when I'd been in LA, eating Sushi and
sipping Sapporo like I knew what the fuck it all meant. The
difference was now I really did live here, alone, just me and
the dogs and the phone that no-one knew the number of yet.
I pulled into the car park of Tesco's and
went inside with my basket on wheels, walking around like a
halfwit in pig-shit heaven, marvelling at the aisles of
brightly-lit foods. The 'discount' stuff, the cheap beans and
cupcakes and toothpaste and thin white bread. I filled the
basket and eyed up the wives who knew more than I about what to
do. The ones with the too big bums and too big bosoms and often
screaming children. I couldn't stop smiling, sometimes
secretly, sometimes not. It was an effort not to go up to them
and give them a hug. Or at least stick my head on their
shoulders. I had just about enough sense left to know that
would not be a right move, nor one easily forgotten in this
small town of horses and he-men with funny country accents. Now
I was the one with the funny accent and I knew I would have to
watch that.
Then later, back at my beautiful little
empty abode, turning over a cardboard box and placing it
arse-face up on the floor for my one plate and penknife
cutlery, I would flip on the little TV with its four channels
and no remote and still think of myself as having somehow
escaped… everything. For now. While at the same time
realising it was all a dream, just something I had managed to
slip into my tea when no one was looking, that sooner than you
wanted it would all change and the real hard stuff would begin.
And it scared me, scared the piss right out of me. But I didn't
think about that, not outside my belly anyway, just went on
eating the cheap beans and cupcakes and drinking the special
tea, made especially for me by me and no one else…
