Mick Wall - Ten Years Gone1

Somehow that felt right, the neatness of it. Everything about the break-up had seemed right. The relationship had been broken for years before either of us had had the guts to say so out loud to each other. When it happened - when she'd finally met someone else - it came as a huge relief to both of us. But that didn't make any of it less painful - at least, not for me. The pain, when it arrived, after about the third day - after she had made her carefully thought out little speech in the lounge - sent me crashing through the floor; to a place I knew at once it would take many years to lift myself from.

I was supposed to be rehearsing a new band, my first real project for months, but now I stayed away from the flat as much as possible, getting utterly drunk each night and sleeping on other people's couches; people I hadn't seen for years that I now threw myself at again.

I lost my looks, lost my hair. I was losing them anyway but now they just went like that, overnight. I didn't care. I was too preoccupied with what else I was losing; what else was already lost. The smart answer, the easy laugh, the art of being young...

I was 36. Some men are still allowed to be young at the age. Not me. I had always looked old for my age, drinking in pubs at 13. Now I was old. I looked it and felt it and was it. I had discovered that getting old was not about the years gained but all the time that had been lost. I flailed around, panic-stricken at the news, like a man with an arrow in his back.

She seemed oblivious to the pain, the way women do in these situations once they've made up their minds. But then she had somebody - a new love. All I had was the dog and the dole queue. It was frightening. She was frightening. Sometimes I had to cry. I couldn't stop myself; didn't want to stop myself. Again, it felt right; the appropriate response. She would stand there laughing at me, embarrassed. I would stagger to the bathroom and lock the door, then collapse in a messy heap on the floor. It was the only place to endure the pain, to let it rage uncontrollably like a fire, without her witnessing it, looking down, mocking and disapproving, as the flames devoured me.

How had I ended up with such a monster? Or was this just what I deserved for all the years of torture I had put her through? I didn't know. I didn't know anything anymore. Now here I was alone, staggering down the two flights of stairs from the flat to the street carrying my various boxes of stuff - the accumulated crap of ten years. When I had moved in, I'd arrived with a plastic carrier bag full of books in one hand, and my guitar case in the other. She had been waiting for me with a glass of wine and I'd been ready to rock within seconds. Now she was gone and it took three days just to get everything I was taking with me into cardboard boxes and down the stairs, into the car and off to whatever relative or friend had been foolish enough to agree to hold onto them until I could get myself sorted, whenever the hell that might be.

To add texture to the backdrop, outside there was a heavy rainstorm in full swing; thunder, lighting, the full Frankenstein movie. It was like the gods had contrived to make my exit as melodramatic as possible. To top it off, I was suffering from flu. Apart from the hangovers, I hadn't had a bad day in bed the whole time we'd been together. Now I had the worse case of flu I'd ever known. It was so bad I actually found myself traipsing to the doctor's; something I would never have done for a normal cold, where whiskey and aspirin would have sufficed. For some bizarre reason the doctor had prescribed me a large 'family size' bottle of Codeine linctus, which he warned might make me drowsy. Was he taking the piss? Or did I just look like a man in need of some serious painkilling? What the hell, I went and got it and guzzled it down. Doctor's orders. What it was supposed to do for my cold I didn't know but it certainly gave me something to smile about as I sat there nodding off over my half-filled boxes of crap that afternoon. I was so stoned I was actually able to get to sleep that night without getting drunk first.

That had been yesterday. Now here I was again, going up and down the stairs, snot streaming from my nose and my throat on fire, completely tripped out on Codeine.

It wasn't easy, extracting yourself piece by piece like that; an endless succession of sad goodbyes as each box was filled and then taken away. The worst moment came when I sat down to choose the pictures I wanted to keep from the photo-albums. I tried to keep it brief. I sensed it would be tough, and anyway, I didn't want loads. But I found myself there for hours, crying and crying until I thought my poor, bloated eyes were going to pop. I was glad we were going our separate ways, it was long overdue. Frankly, we should never have been together in the first place. We were total opposites and there were many times over the years when I really hated the fucking bitch, and many more times I now realised when she must have felt exactly the same about me. Yet when you looked at the pictures you realised it was ten years of your life, for good or ill, and that now it was gone forever.

That, for me, was something to mourn the passing of as sure as if one of us, or both of us, or even just half of one of us, had died. It was the end of something that meant something. Killing it like that, even if it was just putting the miserable beast out of its misery, it took more than just blood and guts. There was also the cost. Like severing a gangrened limb, you had done it, or agreed to have it done to you, in order to save the rest of the body. But afterwards you were still left disabled, weren't you? If the relationship was to have meant anything at all, finishing it off meant killing off a part of yourself too, didn't it?

Then why didn't she feel like this? How could she be so black-and-white about everything? Because she was a woman? Were women really that thick-skinned? I thought of Germaine Greer, who I had just seen on telly, and realised with some relief that, no, not all women were the same. She was like this because she was she. Her. The one who felt nothing for anyone but herself. I can say that now because, while the pain still lingers like a ghost, the smoke has long since cleared from my eyes, and from this distance even her beauty now looks cold and contrived to me.

From her point of view, I was just getting what I deserved; a taste of my own bullshit. It was hard to argue with that. For most of those ten years I had been the one running round calling the shots. She could like it or fuck off, I think I made that pretty clear on enough occasions through the years. My career had taken off and she could count herself lucky I had brought her along for the ride. Now, though, the tables had been turned. Now she was the one in heaven and I was the poor bastard left roasting in hell. It was like Lennon had predicted: bad karma had got me in the end…

The slide had begun, as I always knew it would, when the money - my money - had started to run out. Too long in LA had used me up and I had come back to London a stranger to everybody I had once thought of as friends. As happens with these things, once part of the edifice began to show holes the rest of it quickly crumbled. The band work dried-up and I bought a dog and started going for long walks with it in the park. I couldn't afford to renew my gym membership so I got into Tai Chi by reading a David Carradine book. The only writing I now did regularly was some poetry that had just started to appear one morning, as I sat in the kitchen at the laptop while she told me off for farting all night in bed and really stinking the place out. I was so taken aback by this new level of disgust for me that I began to write down her words, just to be able to play them back later and have a good look at them. They came out short and long, stabbing me in the eyes like knitting needles, so that's how I put them down on the page, accurately disjointed and full of spite. When she'd finished I looked at what I had and decided it was a poem. I called it 'Morning Has Broken' because it just had.

I tried to think of some other unpleasant things that had happened to me recently and put them down the same way, as accurately as possible without any consideration for 'sense' or 'meaning' or god forbid 'rhyming'. I just laid them down one by one like a jumble of coins pulled from my pocket.

I looked at what I had and it seemed to make sense. I tried to think of people I knew and gave them the same treatment, just laying it down, not fair or otherwise, just as it appeared to me at that moment, that I could recall and to hell with whatever I couldn't recall or get 'right'. Again, I liked what came out. Sometimes it didn't work but I was always fascinated to read the results. It was like somebody else was writing these things, all I was doing was literally closing my eyes and waiting for the right or wrong words to come.

I realised something was happening and decided to keep going with it. It hardly paid the bills but that was all right. This was the first piece of writing I'd done since I was a teenager where I was actually trying to say something. I signed on and began to take longer and longer walks with the dog, thinking it over, coming up with new poems every day.

At first she supported me but when I took to staying at home, wanting to write poetry instead of going with her to gigs, she began to lose patience and accused me of having a mid-life crisis.

“I think you're right and that I am having some sort of mid-life crisis, actually,” I agreed, in my new honesty-first mode.

She looked at me as though I had just admitted wetting the bed. “Oh, for Christ's sake,” she scowled. “You're just feeling sorry for yourself. You should get yourself out and about again instead of just hanging round here all the time.”

“I don't hang round here all the time. I take the dog out at least four times a day, for a start.”

“Yes, the dog,” she sighed.

“What about the dog?”

“Maybe you should get a job in a vet's.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it's pathetic. You spend more time with that dog than you do me.”

“I thought you loved the dog…”

“Yeah, but not like you do.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's pathetic…” continue reading