What Rhymes with Bastard?

LINDA ROBERTSON

For my mother

CONTENTS

Part One: The End

1 Me, Jack, and Me and Jack

2 Them and Us

3 Work

4 More Drugs

5 The Trouble with Mum and Dad

6 The Trouble with Everybody Els

Part Two: The Muddle

7 Jack Tries His Luck

8 Confessional

9 Finding a Man in a Haystack

10 Getting It – Finally

Part Three: More Endings

11 My Name Is Linda and I Am a Failure

12 Crazy for Love

13 The NHS Endurance Test

14 Pink Gold

Acknowledgements

Index

Hmm, let’s see . . .

Astard

Castard

Dastard

Eastard . . . no.

Fastard

Gastard

Hastard

I . . . no.

Jastard

Kastard

Lastard

Mastard . . . mastered? No.

Nastard

O . . . no.

Pastard – plastered? Plastered!

This is the story of how a very nice boyfriend became a Plastered

Bastard and how I wrote some songs about it.

Part One:

The End

1: Me, Jack, and Me and Jack

‘Don’t try and change anyone, Linda. I thought I could change your father. You can’t do it.’

Mum

Before everything turned to shit, Jack was my most successful project ever. He was nineteen when I met him, and as much of a mess as his bedroom. Instead of buying food, he spent his student grant on speed, acid, ecstasy and marijuana, surviving on nibbles ‘borrowed’ from the communal fridge. He always left a regretful note, gracious but with no mention of imminent replacement:

Dear John,

I’m so sorry. I took your cheese.

Jack.

I started to collect them. I noticed he chain-smoked roll-ups, went to bed at nine a. m., and drew self-portraits in charcoal on his bedroom walls, incurring the wrath of the college authorities. A little crowd would gather in his room to witness his battles with the head cleaning lady: Brenda, screeching, hands on hips, Jack with his eyes still shut, making polite sounds from his bed. I found this endearing, but some of his strange practices were definitely negatives:

 A tendency to recite Nietzsche in inappropriate social settings.

 A disinclination to wash.

 Going barefoot (which was OK in itself but incurred ridicule from my friends).

 Walking with a chimpanzee-like stoop.

 Holding his feet at right-angles.

 Getting stoned to slow down and taking speed to speed up again.

 Refusing to exercise or even walk on an incline

I considered this list, then I considered the positives: he was tall, handsome, gentle and sweet, and his ineptitude was charming. I knew a good fixer-upper when I saw one. With the maturity of a twenty-two-year-old I set about the repairs.

Five years later I had a fully functioning boyfriend, ensconced within a highly functional relationship, in which life tasks were assigned according to skill sets. Jack handled the higher issues, deciding which books and films were admirable, who was smart, what was right and – most importantly – what was wrong. I took care of the day-to-day stuff, selecting our clothes, furniture, housing, careers, friends and social activities. Household bills, naturally, were always in my name.

Thus far, my project had failed on only two fronts. The first of these was the inordinate amount of time Jack spent on writing projects. During a week-long holiday in 1998, he whiled away thirty-five documented hours writing a two-page letter to his best friend’s mum. Most of his spare time had been poured into a foot-high stack of works-in-progress. I had, admittedly, made some headway by turning him into a copywriter. Churning out text by the yard had increased his pace, but it was still a source of contention. My other failure was Jack’s smoking. He’d been at it for fifteen years and already had circulation problems – a large varicose vein had appeared in his crotch, coiling across his scrotum and up his cock like a power cable.

Achieving this tightly regulated relationship hadn’t been easy. About three months into our courtship, he went temporarily insane and had to be locked up. It was the Easter holidays, and I was stuck at Mum and Dad’s house, waiting for my new boyfriend to arrive from London. By the time he was eight hours late6, I gave up, dried my tears and went off to visit a friend in Southampton. Mum phoned us later that afternoon.

‘Hello, darling,’ she said. ‘I’ve just had a call from a girl who said she was ringing from a mental hospital in Woking. She said she was a fellow patient of your friend Jack’s. What should I do?’

The next day, I drove the hundred miles to the hospital, where I found my new boyfriend hopping round a traffic cone. ‘Hi, Bunny!’ Still hopping, he jiggled my shoulders. I asked him what had happened.

‘The pigs got me!’

‘How did they get you, Jack?’

‘Ha ha! They said, “You can do this the easy way or the hard way,” and I said, “The hard way!” So they beat me up, but it took three of them! Look!’ He showed me a nasty crop of bruises.

Later I pieced together the events: after taking the usual cocktail of speed, acid, dope and ecstasy, he had gone to London and begun a mystical quest for his dad, whom he had never met. He decided his philosophy professor was the most likely candidate, and wrote him a series of impassioned letters, hanging some on trees and posting others, which were later returned in a sealed envelope. He walked around naked in High Barnet, reciting from Ecce Homo, which promptly got him arrested and banned from the borough.1 That was where his friend lived, so now he had nowhere to stay. He

decided to build a raft and escape down the Thames, so he dumped his belongings in the tube station and made his way to Camden Lock, where he started throwing planks and branches into the canal, which wasn’t a river but would do at a pinch. He needed to steer his vessel and spotted an ideal-looking mop on top of a narrow-boat. He ran on board to fetch it, but the owner got upset and called the police.

Jack resisted arrest with the mop and was taken to the cells, where the police psychiatrist decided he was mad, and ordered him put away somewhere else. As all the local NHS wards were full, he was sent to a private hospital on the outskirts of Woking – Willowdell Hall – which took a very relaxed stance towards recovery, as the owners got £300 per patient per day from BUPA or the NHS. In return, they hung crap oil paintings on the walls, and made fancy food. (‘Good evening, Mr Stumford, will you have banoffee pie or peach melba tomorrow night?’) This last luxury was a bit of a waste, as most of the patients were anorexic.

On my second visit to Willowdell Hall, I met Jack’s mother. She was surprised by my loyalty – as her son didn’t seem like good boyfriend material, even to her. She told me how she had raised Jack on her own after having been abandoned by a rich American who had got her pregnant. After the drama of the birth, she’d fallen unconscious and then woke up in a hospital in America quite alone. Where was her baby? Dragging her drip behind her, she’d found him spreadeagled beneath a knife, moments away from circumcision. ‘Get your hands off my beautiful boy!’ she’d snarled, and snatched him back, then limped off to bed; next, she’d taken him back to Wales, where they’d lived with her sister’s family while she retrained as a nurse, working nights, studying by day and forswearing sleep and sex. It was there that Jack grew to manhood with his foreskin intact, surrounded by women, hens and puddles. And it was there, as the damp months turned slowly to years, that he grew a pair of size thirteen feet.

Back in Woking, the doctors had no idea when – or even if – he’d recover. I visited him every day, hoping things would get better, but they didn’t. Private clinics don’t accept dangerous patients, so he was the only male resident. A three-strong harem formed round him, solemnly following him through the grounds, giving him shoulder massages. By flirting with one, he provoked me into having sex with him. His bed collapsed. He had to get a new one, and it was obvious why.

Willowdell Hall was not locked, and Jack went missing on a daily basis. He was often found standing on the road out front, directing traffic with volumes of nineteenth-century poetry.

After three weeks of this sort of thing, I had to return to Cambridge to face my final exams – three years of indolence distilled into six weeks of hell. When Jack and I argued on the phone one night, he tried to escape to Cambridge by hitch-hiking up the M1, and was quickly picked up by the police. I decided I needed to visit him again, but the day I arrived, he suffered a bad reaction to his medication, and things got really nasty. He started saying creepy things, and dribbling, and then his face froze, whereupon the nurses dragged him upstairs, pulled down his jeans and gave him a massive injection in the backside. At once he fell asleep, and I went home.

All too soon, my exams began. While I tackled Paper 7: Near-identical Portraits of Fat Old Men in Wigs, 1740–1860, my mum took my boyfriend out for afternoon tea, accidentally driving the wrong way up a motorway slip-road. ‘Christ, Lins, your mum’s insane!’ he yelled, into the phone.

‘Oh, darling,’ reported Mum, gaily, ‘Jack’s a riot! We were in this café run by Christians and he went up to the owner and said, “You know, I don’t believe in God,” and then had this philosophical conversation with him and, of course, the owner couldn’t keep up. Oh, it was marvellous!’ I was glad they were having fun.

While I struggled with Paper 8: Near-identical Classical-style Buildings in Varying States of Disrepair, 1000 bc–the Present, my parents took Jack out to the Woking shopping centre. ‘And, darling – he disappeared! We thought he’d escaped. He was gone for at least half an hour, and we were panicking. We were thinking we’d have to call the police – oh, it was terrible, I had such a fright, because we were legally responsible for him! And then he came out of the gents’, smiling as if nothing had happened.’

‘Mum, I should have warned you – Jack takes for ever in the loo.’2

Things took a turn for the worse. A bed had come up in an NHS place in Cambridge, and he was being transferred. He was happy that he’d be closer to me, and so was I, until I visited him. It was like one of those re-enactments of nineteenth-century Bedlam you see on BBC2, and the place stank of ladies’ pants. Not surprisingly, he got better pretty fast. That summer, his mum got him a job moving furniture, and watched over him while he got his head back in order. Altogether, it had been a humiliating episode. Jack had no more secrets. Those who cared for him had been hurt, and everyone else was laughing. He loved drugs, but it was official: he couldn’t handle them, and it was my responsibility to make sure he never took them again.

These were the inauspicious beginnings of our story. Not the ideal basis for a solid relationship, you might think, but the fact is, I’d never had a boyfriend before. My mother was beginning to despair, so even a boyfriend in a lunatic asylum seemed better than none. I felt the same way.

I was a teenage solipsist

My early childhood was spent almost exclusively with my mum, a devoted and endlessly interested companion. Her friends’ kids were older than I was, and Dad was busy with his crossword, so it was just the two of us. Perhaps as a result of this, I pursued close one-on-one friendships with a single-minded passion from the moment I was pushed into the social whirl of nursery school. When I made a friend, I didn’t want to share her, and I was never the first to let go. I spent most of my childhood lying in bed, reading – a delicious habit that has the preservative effects of heroin but doesn’t build one’s social skills.

Significant Best Friend No. 1 was Melanie. Aged eleven, we dressed up as pigs and became fast friends. We’d go to jumble sales, then totter home in the worst possible outfits, giggling helplessly. As I was copying her, I’d got Mum to buy me a coat just like hers, from C&A, and we used to hold hands within the matching sleeves. But one year later we were marched off to different schools: I was sent to the local comprehensive, five years of breeze-block hell. Melanie started seeing boys and forgot about me. Aged sixteen, I got a job on the till in the Safeway opposite her house and sat on the fire escape, staring at her and her spotty beau as they walked to the bus stop. I went to her birthday party in my brown Safeway uniform, accessorized with tan tights. As I sat in silence, a blond boy approached. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but do you have any friends?’

I worked at Safeway for £1.79 an hour three nights a week. At all other times, I watched TV. On Saturdays, I played the violin in a youth orchestra until one p.m., then went home and went to bed for the rest of the weekend. For recreation, I ate microwaved muffins and jam, and watched TV. Sometimes I just lay there, looking at my bedroom wall, willing time to pass, waiting to become an adult. Nobody intervened: they don’t really fuss about teenagers who do well at school.

I found someone who hated everyone else as much as I did, and we both dressed up as Christmas trees for non-uniform day in June – an anti-fashion protest that aroused great hostility. That was fun, but it was with unmitigated joy that I left the breeze-block gulag behind. Mum bought me a bus pass and I trekked to Winchester for my A levels. I had a bottle of whisky in my bag, and I’d started reading again, but I was still listening to Bartók and acting aloof. One day, a girl at school made a comment about the rain, and I told her I didn’t have a faculty for discussing weather.

Luckily, Significant Best Friend No. 2 saved me from social death. Alice was the world’s cutest Catholic. She had the button nose, the boobs and the confidence to attract a steady line-up of boys. Her friendship helped me eke out a paltry social life, which pleased my mum. While others my age had curfews and the like, she would happily come and pick me up at all hours from a club, a house, a bar or – more likely – the forty-seven bus stop, where Alice and I spent much of our time.

One person is one thing, but several people are quite another. If the evening involved more than the two of us, I’d spend it on a knife edge, striving so hard to impress people that I’d forget to be nice. To be honest, it never occurred to me to be nice in the first place. I’d never liked groups of people. In junior school I’d giggle away in lessons, then squirm with anxiety as break-time approached. I’d march up and down the playground on my own, practising my whistling. In secondary school, I clung to the periphery of groups, and when it got too much, headed for the library cupboard or the toilet.

I was usually second to last to be picked for teams, one up from the fat kid, and always found myself at the end of the row. I would clam up, then hate myself for it. Not that anyone would have noticed: they were all too busy worrying about themselves. That’s the trouble with solipsism – you think you’re the only one.

By the time I could finally drink and drive legally, I sensed Life just beyond my grasp. I was certain it would begin for real once I got to university. I’d find a little gang of people who were just like me. (Of course, had I actually met anybody just like me, I wouldn’t have liked them.) I couldn’t wait, so I didn’t, despite the social pressure to take a year off and ‘see the world’. I had other reasons to avoid the world, too, and as this stay-at-home stance helped shape my future, I’ll explain a few.

1 I couldn’t imagine enjoying myself, no matter where I went.

2 Financing the expedition would have necessitated six to nine months’ hard labour behind a till or a bar, earning £2 an hour. I could have done it with student loans, but in a household where only the house was bought on credit, such lavish expenditure was unthinkable, and under Mum’s eagle-eyed surveillance, I couldn’t pretend I’d gone to the Isle of Wight instead of Cameroon.

3 I had no one to go with, as Alice was in Poland, and travelling alone is only fun if you like talking to and/or sleeping with strangers. I envisaged myself alone in Thailand, relaxing with date-rape drugs and falling off elephants, fending off Brazilian street kids, swimming in corpse-laden Indian rivers, staggering forlornly up the Himalayas, contracting malaria, playing host to tropical parasites, or (more likely) watching French TV alone as an au-pair.

In October 1991, I arrived at university in a delightful floral dress. No one was impressed.

‘Why do you dress like that?’ said one.

‘Hmm,’ said another.

‘You like to be noticed, don’t you?’

Look closely at our freshers’ photo, and you’ll see tears in my eyes.

On the first night of term, there was a power-cut, and I retreated to my room. I was alone in the dark with a daddy-long-legs. I tracked my new friend as he buzzed across the ceiling in the yellow glow from my bike light, casting a gigantic, sinister shadow. Across the gardens, a crowd in the college bar enjoyed the thrill of the black-out. I fell asleep to the muffled sound of squeals and laughter.

I’d arrived at college unkissed, as insecure as I was arrogant. Hard to approach, and less than beautiful, I continued not to be kissed. The longer this went on, the harder it got to kiss me. When a bitchy boy told me I was predatory, I stopped wearing dresses and switched to pyjama trousers with baggy sweaters. I longed for a lover to halt the vicious cycle. Had I known that one day he’d just walk into my room, I could have saved myself a lot of hassle. While other girls seemed to get drunk, then wake up with a new boyfriend, nothing happened to me, no matter what I did.

I unwittingly got myself cast as a dominatrix in a play about masturbation: nothing (although, years later, the director sent me love packages, one of which contained a photo of my corseted self wielding a whip). I joined Footlights and played the part of a tree: nothing. I sent a red paper heart to a Catholic rugby player, who liked guilty one-night stands with short, busty girls: nothing. I told A to tell B that I liked B without realizing that A was in love with B: nothing. I spent the night in London with a curly-haired idiot film-maker, who got me into his bed, asked how many men I’d ‘had’, then leaped to the far side of the bed when I told him. I went on a blind date with Ali G.

Of course, Ali G didn’t exist back in 1992, so I was actually out on the town with plain old Sacha Baron Cohen, a second-year history student, currently playing the lead in Fiddler on the Roof at the Amateur Dramatics Club. Hundreds of us were out on random dates that night, as part of a fund-raiser, but Sacha had got to choose his date because his friend was organizing the whole thing. He claimed I’d written the funniest application form, but I suspect he’d been swayed by my self-description as ‘blonde, busty and six feet tall’. He did seem a bit disappointed.

‘You’re not blonde.’

‘No.’

He was confident, charismatic, funny, and corrected my English very nicely. He was also, not surprisingly, incredibly popular. We stood outside the local kebab shop in a sea of his friends, and from time to time, he’d put his arm round me and say, ‘This is my blind date!’ A little cheer would go up, after which I’d return to my chip butty. Still, I must have done something right, because I got to hang out with him and his friends a few more times. I adored Sacha, and Sacha’s friend adored me. The friend was sporty and a bit bland, with the same private-school glow of confidence. Aside from the full-length Barbour coat, he was perfectly acceptable – a nice posh football-player. We went to a party together where I drank red wine, which made me want to throw up. ‘There’s a spare room at my place,’ said the friend, ‘and I live just round the corner.’ In fact, he lived about a mile away, and the spare room, I realized gradually, was his bedroom. Even though I kept saying, ‘I want to puke,’ he started dancing with me, then lay on the bed with me and kissed me. Or tried to. I broke away from his embrace, and eventually he fell asleep. At dawn, I sneaked away.

Looking back, it strikes me that he would have been a good one to start with, but I had aspirations beyond sportswear – a cricket jumper here, a baseball cap there – and was looking for an artist or a philosopher. Or maybe a piano-player.

By the end of my first year, I was the only virgin left, outside the computer science department. EVERYONE else had done it, at least once. Everyone. My last romantic relationship had been in 1979, with an eight-year-old boy who lived next door to my nan.

Given the intensity of my same-sex friendships, my mum would occasionally make enquiries about lesbian activities: ‘But what do they do, Linda? Do they use a carrot?’

To help me cope, I told myself that I could never have a boyfriend because there was something wrong with me, and that was absolutely fine because if I didn’t find one by the time I was twenty-five I would kill myself, and then I couldn’t be alone for ever, just three more years, max.

October 1994. I was about to start my final year at university and I was still a goddamned virgin. Sighing, I booked myself into a house full of strangers because there was a gigantic room available, and, as it turned out, four of them were cute: four under one roof! There was the tall guy with the stoop – I liked him because he’d been to art college and didn’t wear shoes, and all my friends thought he was a ridiculous, pretentious twat. Then there was the really good-looking tall one with the bowl cut, and the massive tall one with the Yorkshire accent, and the sweet scientist in the room opposite. I couldn’t cope with all the pressure so I hid in my room and took to peeing in a cup.

Jack – the tall one with the stoop – was intrigued by my air of mystery. One day, he took a phone message for me and then a rare proactive step: he crossed my threshold. I was thrilled – he was in my room! I put the kettle on to boil, and so began his primitive courtship ritual:

1 coming down the stairs and entering my room;

2 sitting in a chair reading a book;

3 not leaving unless explicitly told to.3

He wasn’t much of a talker. One night I gave up hope of conversation and – kind of wishing he’d leave and kind of wishing he wouldn’t – fell into an exasperated, self-conscious sleep while he sat in my chair, quietly reading The English Auden. When I woke up

the next morning, the scene was exactly as I’d left it, except he was three-quarters of the way through the great red tome. A few nights later, he sat in the same chair and began to read Heart of Darkness aloud. I was half bored, half charmed and half asleep to boot. Throughout the night I drifted in and out of consciousness (in retrospect a great way to soak up this delirious tale). Once he’d finished reading, he asked if he could curl up on my bed. I nodded. This went on for several nights, until eventually he plucked up courage to ask to sleep next to me. The weight of his arm round me kept me as wide awake as if it had been a cattle prod. A quiet, trembling joy was bubbling up within me and it was all I could do to keep the lid on. Afterwards when my lumbering suitor was around, I came over all jittery and busied myself with constructing elaborate toasted sandwiches.

He couldn’t work out what was going on. ‘Excuse me,’ he asked, ‘but do you have a boyfriend?’

Adrenalin rushed through me – was I going to be sick? Here was the gigantic, earth-smashing moment I’d been waiting for: at last, something was going to happen! ‘Um, no,’ I replied, looking intently at my knee.

‘Right.’ He nodded.

Sharing a fondness for playgrounds, we’d go on moonlit walks in search of swings. Our favourite park not only had an on-site chip shop but a slide with a wooden Wendy house at the top. We’d climb up and shelter from the rain, chips steaming in our laps. He’d give me ‘blowbacks’ from his joints, bringing his lips perilously close to mine and stunning me into silence for moments at a time. I wasn’t into drugs, except on prescription, but it seemed the friendly thing to do. Maybe I’d learn to like them.

Finally he asked if he could kiss me.

Here was the man I would love for ever. And yet I was furious if he was still there when I woke up in daylight because I didn’t like being looked at. I thought he would notice my face and realize he’d made a mistake. But the days went by and he continued to reappear. He often came to my bed after using drugs, going to sleep at dawn and refusing to budge until well into the afternoon. The college cleaner would come in at eleven a. m and roll Jack on to the floor where he’d lie, snoring, then crawl back between clean sheets. I did my best to keep our relationship a secret, but in such circumstances it wasn’t possible.

That was about all we did for the first three weeks until, during a heavy-petting session, he asked politely to move things forward. I consented – I’d already gone on the pill. Physically, the experience was no more stimulating than my annual date with a speculum, and certainly didn’t match up to the relief and pure joy of being able to say without blushing, at long, long last, that I was a Virgo. For the entire minute and a half, all I was thinking was ‘OH, MY GOD! I’M HAVING SEX WITH A BOY!’ Next, I went to a one-on-one tutorial in which my poor professor enthused about Richard Martin’s crazed heavenly scenes.4 I couldn’t hear a word because my mind was ablaze. An internal voice shouted, ‘OH, MY GOD! I JUST FUCKED A BOY! I JUST FUCKED A BOY!’ I was so excited I almost told him.

I had a boyfriend. I had a fucking boyfriend! He was adorable, strange and polite, and delighted to have me, too. He laughed at my jokes and looked after me when I was ill. I’d set my alarm in the middle of the night so I could wake up and think, There he is. This is my boyfriend. He’s in bed with me. With me!

The sex had novelty value, but that didn’t last – we were always the same people, doing the same things in the same place. A few times Jack struggled to make things more interesting, but he was fighting a losing battle: I didn’t want anal, I liked lying down – and I wanted my home comforts, too. After a couple of scratchy incidents in North Wales and the New Forest, I vetoed outdoor sex.

Heavy Petting

You made me give you a blow-job in a field.I didn’t really want to but to ave a fuss, I kneeled.You wanted me to finish you ithout using my hands – I had to scrunch my lips up tight just like a rubber band.

As I laboured on I felt my knees get damp.Fifteen minutes into it my cheeks began to cramp. You cried out, ‘My God! Don’t stop! I’m nearly there!’ I knew the worst was coming when you grabbed hold of my hair.

OH! Heavy petting in the great outdoors, Caterpillars, ladybirds and dandelion spores, Cold and wet, no privacy, Doesn’t sound like fun to me!

You made me fuck you in among the trees, I didn’t really want to but you kept on saying, ‘Please’, Lying on a prickly patch alive with ants, I was cold and petulant without my pants.

It was over quickly but then, oh, my cries When I saw that I’d attracted half a dozen flies. Leaping up, I grabbed my clothes and drove back home, And that’s where I’ve had sex since then; preferably alone .

OH! Heavy petting in the great outdoors, Caterpillars, ladybirds and dandelion spores, Cold and wet, no privacy, Doesn’t seem like fun to me!

Hmmm, sex. I quite liked it when it was going on, but I’d always need a drink to get remotely worked up, which insulted Jack and pissed me off. I thought he was totally gorgeous, so why didn’t my body react? I put it down to inhibition and my old standby: something was wrong with me. Also, now that I was ensconced in a relationship, all the longing faded away, and sex never crossed my mind unless it was happening. It was like the jam in a doughnut – the sticky, messy bit that came wrapped in lovely sweet dough. A typical post-coital scene looked something like this:

‘Chief, where did you put my knickers?’

‘Huh?’

‘You know, sex is like violin practice: I have a hard time getting started. I can’t be bothered, and then afterwards I feel like it was worth the effort, and I’m, like, “Hmm. I should really do that more often …” So I’m sorry … Jack?’

He’d already be asleep. This kind of activity took a lot out of him, and a twenty-four-hour post-coital depression would inevitably descend.

And so, things pootled pleasantly along until he went mad. When he stopped being mad we ended up in London, like everybody else, living first in a vicarage, then on a council estate and, finally, in our own flat in a mansion block infested with homeless drug addicts. We got easy, silly jobs writing nonsense, and hung out with my friends after work. About five years on, everything was trundling along nicely, but there wasn’t much magic in the air. I was a freelance recruitment copywriter, stuck in the armpit of the advertising industry. I used my wits for the powers of evil, luring people into unappealing jobs. And, for some reason, I felt sad as soon as I had any free time. Our flat was infested with mould, insects scurried through the gaps, the electrician said we’d die if we used the shower, but the sports centre had only one hot one and that was marked ‘disabled’. The day a disabled person banged on the door, I realized I’d had it with London. I walked back through the frost, marched into the bedroom and shoved Jack’s toe.

‘Chief,’ I said, ‘wake up. I want to get married.’

I had a plan: we’d go to San Francisco and ride the dot-com boom with our friends Tim and Tina (T&T). My friend Ben handled fish-fingers and sanitary towels at a fancy product agency in Soho: if I wanted a sexy job like that, I knew I had to move to where the economy was exploding. The Great Move would also salve my travel complex. The Brontës had done OK stuck in Yorkshire; my grandparents would never have left Scotland even if they’d had the chance; my parents thought going to France was an adventure. But expectations had changed, and my lack of international experience had become a source of embarrassment. By the time my thirtieth birthday was just visible with the naked eye, if you squinted hard at the horizon, it seemed I’d missed the boat, the bus and the plane. I was surrounded by well-travelled friends with great photo collections, and all I’d notched up were several trips to Europe, mostly gloom-laden, including a waterlogged French hitch-hiking trip that tor salesman – had taken to waking me up by stroking my forearm. He followed me to Boston airport and sent love-letters for months, culmintriggered my worst cold sores ever. I’d also spent three weeks with a youth orchestra in New England, where my host – a forty-seven-year-old refrigeraating in an offer to leave his wife. ‘Abroad’ seemed a dangerous place. I didn’t want to go anywhere, I just wished I’d already been.

But if I lived abroad, it wouldn’t be ‘abroad’ any more. What I needed was a Significant Change of Address.

Jack agreed to my proposal. I would now be officially, legally secure. ‘Chief,’ I said, ‘I really like belonging to someone, don’t you? Chief?’

‘Mmmm.’

I was surprised that the M-word tasted so delicious. We were being very pragmatic about it, but we did love each other, and … well, I glowed when I thought about it. It would have been nice if Jack had asked me, but I felt honoured to be licensed to reproduce with a man of such noble bearing: with his perfect skin, vision and teeth, and no allergies, he was in the fast lane of the gene pool.

We visited my parents to break the good news. They were delighted by the M-word. ‘Marriage is a promotion for any woman!’ beamed Dad, who wrote a cheque for a thousand pounds on the spot.

Mum was equally unequivocal: ‘Congratulations!’

I was glad that she wasn’t upset – but why the hell wasn’t she upset? Her only daughter, her closest friend and confidante, the only person she could argue with properly, was moving to the other side of the world. ‘Congratulations’?

The next day, I found her weeping in the downstairs loo. I put my arm round her shoulders. ‘What’s wrong, Mum?’

‘Nothing, darling.’ She sniffed. ‘Mother’s all right.’

‘Are you upset about me going away?’

‘Oh, my darling, I didn’t want you to see me like this. I’m going to miss you, of course, but this is a marvellous opportunity for you both and Mother wants the very best for you. You go for it, my darling!’ Sniff.

‘I don’t want you to be sad, Mum.’ I knew she would be, though. I was about to embark upon a grand, transatlantic guilt trip.

Sadly, Jack wasn’t so keen on the sentimentality. ‘I was thinking,’ he said, one day, ‘this wedding, it’s sort of lying.’

‘S’pose so,’ I muttered.

‘Isn’t it, Lins?’

I staunched the hurt with practicalities. ‘Do you want to return all the cheques, then?’

Two months later, Jack and I flew out to see if we liked San Francisco. We stayed with T&T, my dot-com friends. The sun was shining, and there was an English grocery opposite, so we gave it the thumbs-up and booked a wedding for Friday afternoon. Though Mum had initially been upset about me getting married overseas, threatening to book flights for the whole family, 5,500 miles proved an effective deterrent. I couldn’t see myself playing the princess in a family drama: I didn’t look the part, and we hated being together, so what was the point of all that razzmatazz and expense? My dad wasn’t arguing. So, the day after I turned twenty-seven, Jack and I tied the knot in a sweet and minimal way, witnessed by T&T, plus a party of Japanese schoolchildren on a guided tour about seismic retro-fitting. You don’t get City Hall to yourself for nineteen dollars.

We dressed up for the occasion: I wore Miss New Zealand’s dress from the finals of Miss Universe 19895 and Jack teamed a suit with a partridge tie. And the glamour didn’t end there: our wedding night was spent in the luxury suite of the Santa Cruz Econolodge (eighty-three dollars, plus tax), with our two friends. After dinner, we smuggled three bottles of champagne into the hotel pool, splashing ourselves silly then weaving back to the suite, where Jack fell headlong into the master bedroom. I climbed on to the couch with T&T, who had switched on the Shopping Channel. ‘What are you doing, Lins?’ Tim grinned. ‘You should be getting in there!’

‘He was talking about consummation,’ I muttered, and Tina passed me a cushion. Soon the peaceful snores of my new/old husband were wafting through the plasterboard partition and I left my friends to their fat-busting machines and limited-edition hand-painted porcelain dolls.

‘Goodnight.’

A couple of days later Jack and I flew back to London and started the visa-application process. After nine months of tedium, the US Embassy told us that, while our massive stack of paperwork was in order, I couldn’t have a Green Card unless Jack had a US address and a job that paid more than $22,000 a year. While he sorted that out, I had to stay in the UK.

Separation was a daunting prospect, but I was determined not to give up. I told Jack when to resign from his London job, booked his flight, gave notice on the flat, and made plans to stay with friends for a couple of weeks while he picked up a job in the US.

Then he had flown away to become my stars-and-stripes-crossed lover. Every few days he’d call me. Our conversations were always the same.

‘I miss you, Bun.’

‘I miss you, too.’

‘I wish you were here, Bun.’

‘I wish I was, too.’

‘I miss making love with you, Bun.’

‘I miss, um, you, too.’

1 High Barnet police are notorious for their poor taste in literature.

2 I have calculated that, over the years, I have spent around 250 hours waiting for Jack in similar circumstances.

3 Stages 2 and 3 were facilitated by constant marijuana use, which left no money for food – hence the kitchen ‘borrowing’.

4 Richard Martin painted bizarre bombastic biblical epics full of clouds, angels, devils and ecstatic ascents to heaven.

5 I had inadvertently befriended a beauty queen.

2: Them and Us

‘There are a lot of idiots in this world.’

Mum

‘Hi, Linda …’s Jack! ’S OK… I’ve prob’ly godda place …’s OK, m’Bun. Carn talkboudit now …’s OK, luv you!’

Jack had been in San Francisco for three months when he found a place. It was a depressing shit-hole full of annoying clowns, but it was his. That filthy den was to be the perfect backdrop to our decaying love.

When, after a long and increasingly desperate search, he got a job, I was legally able to join him. I had to have three vaccinations, an AIDS test and a TB X-ray; I got the all-clear. I got on the plane, off the plane, on another plane, and seventeen hours later, stumbled into San Francisco airport, laden with musical instruments and ready for my new life in the sun.

As I rolled my luggage cart through the double doors, I saw my long-lost husband leaning against a pillar, wearing a familiar brown shirt and a gentle smile. ‘Hello!’ he said. We shared a hug and lots of little kisses, and he steered us to the taxi rank, one arm round me, the other on my luggage mountain.

I’d played out this moment endlessly in my mind, complete with trumpet fanfare and fireworks, but now that it was real, it felt strangely normal to see him. I checked, and he felt the same way. How could it be so prosaic? I plumped for an answer that felt good: ‘I think we’re back where we belong, Chief, so why should it be exciting to come home?’

He tightened his grip on my shoulders. ‘That’s right, Bun.’

I was in our bedroom, unpacking my accordion. ‘Listen to this!’ I launched into a halting rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’.

‘That’s great, Bun! Can we have sex now?’

‘Don’t you want to hear “Over the Waves”? I can almost do it without stopping.’

‘I’ve got vodka in the freezer!’ He ran off to get me a shot, then proffered it across my heaving bellows. I stopped playing, unstrapped myself and drank up. It felt good to be held again. Oh, yes! I thought. Sex is nice, isn’t it? Why did I always forget?

‘Oh, my Bun,’ sighed Jack afterwards, drifting into a sleepy miasma. ‘It’s so great to have you back. I can’t wait to show you off to everyone tomorrow.’

I lay beside him in the dark, wide awake. Fuck. I was here. I’d made it all happen. The car engine had stopped, but this time the melancholy of arrival was tinged with wicked relief, as if I’d avoided cleaning up after a wild party by running away at dawn. Now I couldn’t look after Mum.

The next morning I began to meet my new housemates. Let’s start at the front of the house and work our way back.

Main bedroom

In the bed

Name: Kyle

Age: 25

Appearance: pulled-up knee socks with shorts

Philosophy: evangelical Christian

Source: Texas

Occupation: art student

Manner: silent but creepy

Liked:

 picking up short women and throwing them on to soft surfaces.

 lube samples.

 painting dark splodges evocative of unbearable suffering.

 tinned pears.

 sniggering about boobs after dark

On the floor

Name: Mike

Age: 42

Appearance: short, fat and hairy

Philosophy: evangelical Christian (same church)

Source: Texas (same town)

Occupation: sound engineer for touring production of Les Misérables

Manner: jovial

Liked:

 curry.

 snoring.

 large boobs

Back bedroom (back half of the double parlour. In auditory terms, the same room)

Name: Jack

Age: 25

Appearance: tall, handsome, etc.

Philosophy: BA/it rains for a reason

Source: Wales and America

Occupation: copywriter/misanthropic poet

Manner: plodding, well-intentioned

Liked:

 dogs

 British punk music 1978–83.

 anal sex (aspirationally).

 vodka (liberally).

 cigarettes (nostalgically).

 me (emphatically)

Bathroom

Well-established conurbations of four billion-plus, devastated by surprise attack of UK origin

Hallway

Name: Tova

Age: 24

Appearance: travelling girl

Philosophy: I want therefore I get

Source: Canada

Occupation: boat-hand/self-promoter

Manner: upfront and annoying

Liked:

 sex.

 travelling.

 talking about sex and travelling.

 rice.

 yoga.

 shouting in Spanish to her boyfriend, (who emerged, cockroach-style, as soon as she’d secured the ‘room’)

Name: Chico

Age: 34

Appearance: small, brown, hardened

Philosophy: Tova wants, therefore I get it for her

Source: Chile

Occupation: boat-hand and burger-flipper

Manner: benign or confused, maybe both

Liked:

 sex.

 travelling.

 rice.

 yoga.

 his sister (they’d recently ended a long-term, live-in relationship)

Kitchen

Name: The miserable boy who lives in the kitchen

Age: c. 20

Appearance: lank

Philosophy: why?

Source: America

Occupation: lying on the couch reading academic books about torture, death, prostitution

Manner: limp

Liked:

 fraternizing with the landlord’s arch enemy, which led to him being punched in the face, thrown out of the kitchen and chased up the street by the landlord, who was driving a truck

Utility nook

Name: Richard

Age: 28

Appearance: fuzz-headed loon with too many teeth

Philosophy: whatever, dude!

Source: Oregon

Occupation: skateboarder, thief

Manner: insane

Liked:

 skateboarding

 TV

 pizza.

 a sixteen-year-old girl whom he had to return – drunk, unconscious and splattered with her own vomit – to her grandmother.

 yelling inanities

Our ‘landlord’ was also an official resident, and the most interesting of the lot. He was one of many parasitical entrepreneurs shot to power by the dot-com boom. As people fought for space and rents tripled, he moved in with his girlfriend and illegally sublet his dingy flat to the drifters, thieves and unemployed copywriters no one else wanted. It was a sort of for-profit charity. To ward off the usual avalanche of responses, he posted vacancy ads like this:

Small hallway available No Christians

The place was full of his crap, and every so often he popped ‘home’ to fuss about bills and pick up a volume of intellectual erotica. He’d caused a scandal at the art college with a performance piece involving an enema – a quick Google told me he’d found a student volunteer, got him to sign a waiver, tied him up, extracted shit from the volunteer’s backside, and then from his own, exchanged the faecal matter using an enema, fellated the volunteer and exited to a smattering of polite applause. Next he was expelled, and six months later he was still recoiling from the shock.

‘Honestly, Linda,’ he said, out of the blue, ‘he was into it at the time!’

I put down my sandwich. ‘Who was?’

‘That bastard kid!’

‘You mean the one you did the enema stuff to?’

‘Yeah! But when the story went national, they all changed their tune. He lodged a formal complaint against me, coz he was afraid of lookin’ like a pervert! Some sponsor got antsy so they used me as a scapegoat. They banned me from campus! I feel kind of betrayed, you know?’

The affair had turned him to drink, but it was hard to tell, as he claimed to be a professional wine-taster. Surrounded by charts of Italian grape regions, empty wine crates and magazine racks bulging with copies of Connoisseur, he liked to shoogle a huge wine glass, saying, ‘Mmmm …’ In fact, his experience was limited to two months on the till at Quoit Liquors, and he was currently unemployed. His identity in crisis, he made a big deal of his friendship with Steve Labash, a performance artist and high priest in the Church of Satan, whose best-known protest piece involved him being naked with a bottle of whisky:

1 Smash the neck off a whisky bottle.

2 Slash your skin with the raw edge.

3 Pour the rest of the whisky over your wounds.

But all the enemas, devil-worship and lit-porn in the world couldn’t conceal his darkest secret: he was nice.

A card had already arrived from home.

Dear Linda, just your old mum writing to say hello. I found

this postcard from when we were in the Isle of Wight – Dadtripped up in the mud, remember? Look after yourself, mydarling; I’ve got to run to catch the post, lots of love,Mum XXX

Back in the present, things weren’t so sweet. Jack would leave for work every morning, and I’d have a lonely day to fill. By late afternoon, I might have visited the ironmonger’s three times – it’s amazing how many things you don’t realize you need until you’re really bored. I was becoming a familiar face to the strange man behind the counter. ‘Your total is sixteen-oh-nine!’ He beamed. ‘I love your accent. Australia, right?’

I reached for my rubber-footed cheese-grater. ‘England.’

‘Well, close, eh?’

‘Not really.’

‘English, eh? There are some great Irish bars around here. We should go out for a drink some time.’

‘Mm … yeah.’ I looked down into my purse. I wasn’t used to this kind of talk. I’d never been on a date.

‘Yeah,’ he pressed on, ‘like Jimmy Foley’s and the Green Giant. You know them?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, see you!’

As soon as I was out of the door, I broke into a run. This meant I couldn’t go into the hardware shop any more. Damn it. I was so bored it seemed like a loss. This wasn’t how I’d envisaged the Golden State. The laws of gravity still applied: it was just plain old reality, minus my friends. Admittedly, the weather was better, and I found all kinds of reasons to go outside. I walked up and down perilously tilted pavements, each block affording me another fabulous sea-andsky-filled view, buildings tumbling together, nestling in valleys and skimming hilltops as though they were on the crest of a wave. The air was warm and breezy, rich with ions, and its touch on my skin was a pleasure. On cloudy days the locals moaned, while I gasped at the mist – chunks of cloud suspended in the air like scenery in a divine school play. But however beautiful my surroundings, I didn’t belong there.

I confided in Jack: ‘It makes me so angry, Chief. I have you, and that’s just the most amazing thing, and I’m still sad. Why can’t I just be happy?’

‘That’s what you always say, and you never are. To be honest, I don’t think you ever will be.’

So I went to the doctor and told her I’d been feeling a bit blue. Without blinking, she wrote me repeat prescriptions for a thousand Prozac capsules. ‘You should be feeling better in about three weeks.’ I read that the side-effects included lower libido and increased homicidal urges.

As I made dinner, Tova would sidle in and tell me about her amazing life – the places she’d been, the people she’d met and the wild things she’d done. She could make anything dull, but next to this vigorously sprouting shrub, I felt like a limp, etiolated stem. To protect myself, I responded only to direct probes, such as ‘You’re from England, right?’

‘Yup.’

‘Hmm. Where else have you lived?’

‘Here.’

‘Just here? Well, where have you been, like long trips?’

‘Nowhere.’

‘Oh … Really?’

‘Really.’

She was all about the where, not the what. I couldn’t stand her, and boycotted the kitchen when she was around. Jack would come home from work to find me sitting on the bed with an open can of tuna and a bag of crisps.

‘Here’s dinner, Chief.’

‘Lins, can’t you at least make some pasta?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to talk to Tova while it boils.’

‘Well, you turn on the water, then I’ll go in a bit and sort it out.’

I agreed, but she caught me in the hall and pointed at my pink socks. ‘Look, Chico!’ she cried, laughing. ‘They match her sweater!’ I was a pink moth, writhing on a pin. ‘Ah, yes,’ she said, ‘I used to do that – match stuff. When I was much younger, of course.’

I reversed back into our room. ‘Jack,’ I hissed, ‘we have to get out of this place! I can’t stay indoors in the daytime because it’s like a dungeon and it makes me feel really sad and I can’t go outdoors because there’s nothing left to buy and I’m getting sunburned and I can’t stay indoors at night because I’m going to kill Tova and I can’t go out at night because there’s nowhere to go because I don’t have any friends.’

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ said Jack. ‘We can get some food, too.’

We clambered to the top of Lombard Street, a giant game of crazy-golf, twisting and turning down towards the mass of the city. Beyond the clustered lights lay the black expanse of the bay, and beyond that more land, more lights, more people, doing more interesting things than I was. It was time to confront the truth: I was not a writer, because writers write stuff.

‘Chief,’ I wailed, sitting down, ‘I’m just, like – nothing! And my face is all bumpy.’

It was true: I’d got a weird sort of rash. He patted my head. ‘It’s OK, you’re still the best rabbit in the world!’

My tears blurred the city into a twinkling puddle. ‘I’ll never write anything except recruitment ads!’

Jack held me close. ‘That’s OK, Bun. I’ll still love you more than anything in the world and I’d love you if you couldn’t even write your own name.’ He cradled my head in his lap and wiped my tears on his shirtsleeve. ‘Poor Bun. You’ve got mascara all over your face.’

Comforted, I grew calmer. We had a few minutes of silence while he stroked my hair. ‘It’s OK.’ I sniffed. ‘You know, I feel kind of a sense of relief. Denying it all this time, when it’s fine not to write stuff. Who cares?’

‘Well, maybe you don’t need it to be my lovely Bun, but you might need it to be a happy, fulfilled rabbit.’

How annoying. Not just the herbivore references – he wouldn’t let me off the hook. All of a sudden I had an idea. I sat up, still sniffing. ‘I know! I could write about all the freaks I meet here!’

He squeezed my hand. ‘That’s a great idea. You’ve got all this time, Bun, and you’ve not had it for years. You deserve to put it to good use. If nothing else, it’ll make you feel better. You can write short stories.’

‘Can’t do anything that long.’

‘Poems, then.’

‘Nobody reads poems except other poets.’

‘Hmm.’

‘What if I stuck a tune on top? Then they’d be songs. And maybe a few people will listen.’ I’d written a song once, to promote the use of dustbins on school premises. I was back on track, so we got some dinner, and then returned to the house, where Jack immediately conducted a bottom inspection. It was a new habit of his, and it got on my nerves.

‘Hmm, let’s see. Turn round.’ He put his hands inside my knickers and started feeling around. ‘Oh, it’s been trimmer – it’s been trimmer! You’ll have to keep hopping up those hills, Bun!’ Soon his hands were round my waist, then inside my shirt, and he seemed to have forgotten about my below-par backside. ‘I love you, Bun.’

‘I love you too, Chief.’

Lips met and tongues coiled together as he began to unpeel my skirt; my clothes always seemed to be falling off when Jack was around. Suddenly he disengaged. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I’ve got an idea.’

‘What?’

‘Let’s do it standing up.’

‘What? No.’

‘Well, how about the other way, then? It feels nice, you know. I stuck that corn-on-the-cob up my arse and it was … you know … It felt good.’

I was sick of hearing about that damned thing, a plastic corn-onthe-cob vibrator we’d been given as a wedding present. I’d thrown it out after he’d claimed repeatedly to have stuck it up his butt. ‘Jack,’ I said, ‘I still don’t believe you did it. Or with the wine bottle.’

‘I did it! It was just the spout. Why don’t you believe me? Why would I lie?’

‘Look, Jack, I’m not having anal sex with you.’

‘So let’s do it standing up, then. Go on!’

‘No.’

‘Christ, Lins, you’re so boring.’ He went to bed in a huff, his face turned towards the wall. What was going on? He’d never asked for stuff like that when we were in London.

I spent much of the next day working out a song on my accordion. When Jack got home from work, he hugged me and the accordion, and asked if we could have sex standing up.

‘No.’

‘You can take the accordion off.’

‘No.’

‘Please, Lins. We always do it lying down.’

‘I like lying down. Why do something standing up when you can do it lying down?’

‘Go on.’

‘I want to play you my song.’

He stepped back and crossed his arms. ‘Go on, then.’

My Landlord is a Pervert

My landlord doesn’t live here, and that’s a piece of luck

Coz he isn’t very fussy about what he likes to fuck.

My landlord is a pervert, and that’s all right with me,

He keeps the house in order, and sometimes stays for tea.

He keeps his books at our place – philosophical texts,

Nietzsche, Kant and Hegel on the ins and outs of sex.

My landlord is a pervert, and that’s all right with me,

He keeps the house in order, and sometimes stays for tea.

He is awfully fond of enemas and he does them in the park,

Finds an unsuspecting vagrant and makes his muddy mark.6

My landlord is a pervert, and that’s all right with me,

He keeps the house in order, and sometimes stays for tea.

He is best friends with a male prostitute and a Satanist called Steve,

They hang out in hard-core nightclubs with sailors on shore leave.

My landlord is a pervert, and that’s all right with me,

He keeps the house in order, and sometimes stays for tea!

‘That’s great, Bun! So, can we do it standing up?’

‘No.’

‘Please.’

‘I’ll get cold.’

‘Go on – put your wedding shoes on and then you’ll be tall enough.’

He was starting to get snotty, and I couldn’t stand being frozen out. ‘Back in a sec,’ I said, and trotted off to the kitchen for a swig of vodka. The wedding shoes were six-inch platforms with black leather ankle straps. I did up all the little thongs and wobbled to a precarious upright.

‘Christ, Lins.’ He grinned. ‘You’re so fuckable! Stand up! There you go. See, we’re nearly the same height now so we can do it like this. It’ll fit.’

I felt horribly exposed without a bed on one side of me, like a giant whiting fillet. The 3-D nudity was especially awkward in those ridiculous shoes. And how was I supposed to come? I couldn’t twiddle myself to a climax with Jack in the way. Still, it was probably worth it; otherwise he’d be a grumpy sod. Five more minutes, I told myself, and I’d be back on the bed, reading my book.

‘Bend your knees a bit, Bun.’

I assumed the don’t-get-pee-on-your-shoes position while he shoved, blindly.

‘Help me, then, Lins. A bit of guidance, for God’s sake.’

I sighed. ‘Is this going to happen every time I wear these shoes?’

He oiled the machinery with spit and tried again. ‘Aah, that’s it.’ Uuup down up down up down up down up down up down up down up down up … My shoulder-blade kept knocking against the door jamb. And I was cold.

The best thing about fucking was that I got to lie down.

3: Work

‘You’ve got to have enough money. That’s the most important thing.’

Mum

If I’d held on to my career, it would have been easier to hold on to Jack. But who was I to make the rules when he made all the money?

As much as he despised his new job, he liked his new workmates: ‘They’re such a great bunch, Lins!’ Their interests ranged from drinking and smoking to talking in funny accents. They bonded through cigarettes, which had been Jack’s comfort since he was ten years old. After gargantuan efforts, I’d had him off them for a few months, but his new colleagues thought that true friends die together, and invited him for a smoke five or six times a day. Eventually, his resolve cracked and they initiated him into the gang with a flaming lighter. To his delight, he was then automatically included in the after-lunch pot-smoking sessions. He kept on telling me how cool they were, once you got to know them.

‘Mmm,’ I said.

‘They’re so social and loyal – it’s amazing.’

‘Mmm. Do they ever see anybody from outside of work?’

‘Well, they spend every Friday or Saturday night together, at any rate. I guess it’s pretty incestuous, though. Like, there’s this tarty account-handler whom everyone fancies, called Gayle – she’s really sweet, she’s got an amazing arse, you have to see it, she’s kind of pudgy but really cute-looking – and I thought it was just kind of light-hearted, but some of them are deadly serious about it. They’re fighting over her!’

‘Really? Who’s going to win?’

‘No one. She’s really smart. Dressing like that and acting flirty gets her what she wants, but I don’t think she’ll do it with any of them. They’re dying of frustration, but no one will actually ask her out.’

‘Do you fancy her?’

‘No, not really. Well, to be honest, I just want to fuck her up the arse.’

While Jack’s anal-sex fixation grew ever more intense and while – unbeknown to me – our relationship was careening towards the rocks, I remained jobless and increasingly desperate to get out of the house. I’d gaze at the towers downtown, speckled with a million windows, a million ways in, thinking that somewhere, in all of that, there had to be a little space for me. I longed to find a job, but I’d never had much luck in that department. After all, back in London, I’d worked in recruitment advertising.

What the fuck is ‘recruitment advertising’?

In London, you’re never more than eight feet away from a rat or a recruitment advertisement. This clandestine industry operates under the radar of normal human awareness, like the Masons without the handshakes and the (alleged) sex parties. Here’s what’s going on: some crap companies struggle to find good staff, others to find any staff at all. Instead of increasing salaries or improving working conditions, they prefer to spend their money on tailor-made propaganda with which to ensnare unsuspecting candidates. And that’s where the recruitment ad agency comes in. It’s not a field that anyone aims to get into, and this was how it happened to me:

In 1995, I graduated with no useful skills. I guarded books in the library of a stately home (where my parents discovered me asleep on the job, sitting upright in a chair), cleaned toilets and made coffee. I then worked on the till in Boots, tended a bar and worked in a cake shop – a nightmare for anyone with a potentially fatal allergy to eggs. In the new year, I went to Liverpool to volunteer in an arts centre for poor kids, where I learned that poor kids were scary. The centre was an unheated church, which was so viciously cold that I chose to run a bake-your-name-in-a-biscuit class, the lure of the oven outweighing the stress of working with eggs. Fifty hours a week I was embroiled in some farcical activity or other, entitling me to a mattress in an unheated, dusty attic. This was winter in the north of England. There was snow on the ground. I washed my jumper, hung it to dry in the basement and returned three weeks later to find it wetter than ever. No one ever took off their clothes except to have a bath. Three months of this was enough to give me some kind of lung disease, so Mum and Dad drove up to rescue me.

Next, I went to France with Jack, where I contracted chicken-pox, and ended up back with my parents, covered with pink spots. When I was up and about again, I got a job as a pizza waitress, and discovered too late that the uniform had short sleeves. I tried to cover up my arm scabs with concealer, but lasted only a day. Then I decided to go abroad, but an intensive Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) course took me no further than south London. Teaching English to Italians in Tooting (TEIT) was a three-hours-a-day gig that involved six trains, and I was fired before the summer ended.

All this time, I’d been applying for bottom-of-the-rung jobs in anything connected with words. Dozens of applications had resulted in just two interviews, both of which I’d mucked up by speaking with unrelenting sarcasm in a tremulous whisper. Eventually I realized I’d have to work for nothing, and condescended to contact the editorial departments of various magazines. To my surprise, they had all filled their slave-labour quotas, so I targeted the picture desks instead, hoping to get a toe in the door. My first ‘yes’ was from Tatler, so that was where I started. I didn’t know that it was a society-’n’-shopping rag for the landed gentry. Too late, I found myself knee deep in cashmere pashminas with matching handbags. For full-time grunt work, I got travel expenses, plus three pounds a day for lunch, which nicely plumped out my thirty-nine-pounds-a-week dole money. (Mum was taking care of my rent – twenty pounds a week for a mattress on the floor in a vicarage.) On my first day at the swanky office I wore a red wool dress I’d picked up in Portobello market. ‘I don’t believe it!’ neighed the editor. ‘A work-experience girl who knows how to dress!’

The magazine operated like a feudal society, in which the ideas came from half a dozen posh people, with unnervingly white teeth, who passed on the labour to an army of unemployed graduates. While we toiled away, the skeleton staff (no joke, they were all anorexic or dying to look it) spent their days blabbing on the phone, chewing salad leaves or getting their teeth polished. A typical day involved traipsing to New Bond Street to pick up a £5000 Loewe suitcase for a photo-shoot, then spending three hours on the phone fact-checking an insultingly vague, scrawled wish-list of dream luggage for winter skiing holidays.

But as those three excruciating months drew to a close, I was filled with dread. Worse was to come: I was scheduled for six weeks on the picture desk at Vogue. I’d been up there on various errands, and everyone had matching belts and nails, and pointy shoes that cost at least thirty pounds per toe. Every night I prayed to the media gods: ‘Please, let me get a job before I have to go to Vogue.’ In between, I had a placement at i-D magazine, the po-faced style bible for urban hipsters. Everyone was fashionable and cool. Because they weren’t fake, they weren’t friendly. The art director was indifferent, unshaven, and seemed surprised to see me. ‘I suppose you could do some photocopying,’ he mumbled. In desperation, I went to the loo, but I couldn’t get back into the office as I didn’t know the door code. Trapped in a cold, echoing corridor, I lost it. I ran from the building in a flood of tears. Hysterical, I phoned Mum, who listened sympathetically and advised me to catch the first train home.

And then the unthinkable happened – I got an interview. The job title was ‘journalist’. With glam mags on my CV, I felt it was within my grasp. This feeling was waning a week after the interview, when Jack decided to take action. He sat me on his lap and said firmly, ‘Now, Bun, call that bitch and tell her why you’re the best person for the job.’

‘I can’t. I’ll look desperate.’

‘Lins, you are desperate. Do it.’

‘What if I’m not the best person for the job?’

‘You are. Course you are. Now do it. Call her now. I’m right behind you.’

He held me tight, and I made myself do it, earning a big kiss and – after my trial period – eleven grand a year.

Eleven grand! It seemed a lot of money until I tried to live on it.

My new boss was a bitch. A smiley bitch with a fake laugh and bad suits. This tousle-haired Medusa barked orders in threes, and sneered when I asked her to repeat, so I’d go round asking people to guess what she wanted. ‘OK, here are the clues: umbrellas, under the window and Prince Albert.’ I’d walk round the block waiting for the tears to stop, hide in the loo or take refuge in the storage cupboard (where, contrary to office lore, I was discovered asleep only once). My job title was misleading: the place sold pictures, and I wrote the accompanying text, which helped sell the snaps, but rarely got published alongside them. I would whiz through my daily atch of fashion and celebrity snaps, then get to work on old stock – pictures of homing pigeons or the Queen Mother’s ready-to-run obituary. To break the tedium, I took down my trousers and modelled a fart-filter (my rear later appeared in a Swedish magazine), and interviewed a corporate shaman, who sat in the office burning sage while we danced to her drumbeat, snickering. I was sent out to interview a man who had been sexy in 1962.

I soon jumped ship and landed in the West End, next to the BBC HQ and the flagship branch of Top Shop, in the dark heart of recruitment advertising. My colleagues were all male, witty and self-deprecating. It was the first place where I felt I belonged to the gang, and our day-long banter detracted marvellously from the demoralizing work. Together we filled our days with useful activities: one tapped away at a screenplay laid out on his monitor to look like ad copy; others stood by the window, spotting stars going in and out of the BBC building, before joining the head of copy at the Dog and Pickle around noon. Later in the day we’d make paper costumes or throw things at each other, running up ads whenever there was a lull in activity.

My favourite client was Sun Valley, a chicken-processing plant in Yorkshire. Sun Valley was a great place to work for three reasons:

1 You got paid.

2 You got a free pair of rubber gloves and a hat.

3 You might not have to deal with giblets.

It was my job to convince unemployed locals that this was a marvellous career opportunity. I churned out dozens of variations on a feathered theme: Your beak break! Give us a wing! Our boss, the creative director, would descend unpredictably from his penthouse, and pace about, making us all nervous. One day, after I’d been there a couple of months, he leaned over my shoulder and said gently, ‘Could we have a word?’ I followed him into a small, cold room with no windows, where we sat down. ‘Linda,’ he said, ‘it’s been noticed that you leave work at five p.m. almost every day.’

‘Yes,’ I acknowledged. ‘That’s what’s on my contract.’

‘Ye-e-s,’ he said, ‘but it’s supposed to be a minimum.’

‘But I’ve always got my work done when I leave.’

‘Ye-e-s, but is it done to the best of your abilities? It’s about giving one hundred and ten per cent here. So, this weekend, I want you to ask yourself if you really want to work here at Jobfab.’

I was stunned. Nobody did a stroke of work after five. It was all right for the boys, but could I really stand another eight hours a week of indoor cricket, Tomb Raider and free beer?

On Monday afternoon, I met up again with my boss. I’d spent the morning in the loo with stress-induced diarrhoea, and I had nothing left to lose. ‘So, Linda,’ he began, ‘did you think about what we said?’

I nodded. ‘I guess I’m not as committed as the rest of the creative department.’ He made a ‘yes, indeed’ face. ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘you can tell that straight off from my Tomb Raider rating.’

‘Tomb Raider?’

‘Face it, my score’s way below the others. I’m no good at cricket, and I can’t drink half as much beer.’

‘So … ?’

‘So what I’m saying is, I think it would be best for everyone if I left, and tripled my income by freelancing at other agencies.’7

‘Now, hold on, Linda, let’s not—’

And thus began the next stage of my career:

Linda Robertson Nomadic Copywriter

nomadcopy@bullshit.co.uk

Exorbitant rates * No job too risible

This led to the same old rubbish, but at three times the pay. I’d sit in gloomy offices with sagging ceiling tiles, waiting for an account-handler to brief me on how to promote pest-control jobs with Hackney Council. I photocopied novels so they looked work-related, and read my way through the long, grey days, taking grotesquely extended lonely lunch breaks.

That was the past, and Tina was taking care of the future, right here in San Francisco. She got me an interview at her marketing agency, Think! ‘They’re all Mormons,’ she explained, ‘but they’re OK. Except David … He’s – well, you’ll see.’

David Aarse was her boss, and two weeks after my arrival in the city I found myself perched next to him on the San Francisco waterfront, blinking in the dazzling white light. The bay shimmered blue and white, and a fresh breeze tickled my arms. It was like having an interview in heaven – if this kept up, I’d get a tan. I took a deep, refreshing breath and turned to face my interrogator. The sun glowed like a halo through the bleached remnants of his hair, and black shades masked his eyes. As he flicked through my embarrassing portfolio, he muttered: ‘Crap … crap … crap … Art direction’s terrible … Now, that one’s OK …’ I tried to begin my spiel, but each time, he held up a silencing palm and flicked on through the book. Then, suddenly, he snapped it shut. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you can’t write, but I like your accent. Linda, are you funny?’

‘I think—’

‘Don’t think, do. That’s the Think! motto. Listen, Linda, we’re putting together an Internet movie, and we need an interviewer. Can you do it?’

‘Um, yes,’ I said, and cleared my throat. ‘I was told fifty to seventy dollars an hour is the going rate.’

David turned his face to the sky. ‘Well, Linda … I can only do twenty-five – an intern rate, I know, but it’s going to be worth it. You see, we’re in … what you might call an interesting situation.’

I asked him what he meant and he took a deep breath. ‘Linda, we have no clients. That means we don’t make any money. However, it offers huge creative freedom. Think! is a very exciting place to work right now. It’s a true challenge.’

I accepted the challenge and the 75 per cent pay cut and returned home with a spring in my step – David Aarse wanted me Think! ing ASAP!

The very next morning I travelled purposefully downtown, gazing up at skyscrapers that jutted into flawless blue.

‘I like your pants!’ said a passer-by.

I reeled, and then I remembered: Americans talk to strangers; pants = trousers.

Soon I was gliding in a gold-plated lift to the Think! reception area, where a young woman sat reading a magazine in the shade of a gigantic, asymmetric blaze of tropical flowers. She looked up and smiled, gesturing for me to proceed. I found myself in a space the size of a football pitch, in which enough people to make up two teams swivelled listlessly in thousand-dollar ergonomic chairs. The place was heaving with the latest technology and the fridge was stocked with organic smoothies. I wondered vaguely who was funding all this, but then Tina came up and showed me round and I got distracted by all the activity. I was working on a website that would have been for Comedy Central TV if they’d commissioned it, but as they hadn’t we had to keep it a secret in case they sued us for using their logo. The website spoofed the X Games8 – taking place a few blocks down the road – using tiny skateboards and bicycles from cereal packets, and served to demonstrate the Think! flair. By the end of the day I had the Think! system pretty much worked out:

A week later, I was standing on the pier in San Francisco, surrounded by X-treme sports fans with grey hoodies and outsize jeans melting over their sneakers. In my red polka-dot blouse, I felt like a cross between a clown and a traffic cone.

David Aarse interrupted my thoughts. He was preaching to his acolytes. ‘A great creative solution isn’t just about pretty pictures or witty strap lines. Never overlook the importance of the financial aspect. Because no business can operate on gloss alone.’ He reached up to smooth his gleaming hair-nimbus. It was true: to demonstrate their business savvy to their non-existent clients, the Think! team would do anything – hang the expense! He turned to me. ‘Now, see, Linda, this is what we’re looking at …’

As far as I could tell, he wanted me to conduct hilarious interviews with skate-kids that would surreptitiously convey valuable data on the consumer habits of the target market sector. Under ideal conditions, I’d have struggled to build a rapport with them, and these conditions were far from ideal. For a start, David had decided that I wouldn’t appear on camera: instead the on-screen interviewer would be a doll-head on a stick. I would crouch out of shot, addressing my questions to a knee.

‘OK, Linda,’ called David, ‘we’re rolling!’ I cleared my throat and unfurled the question list, which kept flapping in the wind. Now, was there a question that wasn’t too dreadful … ?

‘Rolling!’ said David, again.

‘Um,’ I said, to a flapping trouser-leg, ‘why do you smell of tuna?’

‘Whaaaah?’

David bent down. ‘Linda, he can’t hear you.’

I tried again. ‘Why Do You Smell Of Tuna?’

‘Whaaaah?’

Our cameraman turned to the kid: ‘Sorry, man, she has an accent. The question is, why do you smell of tuna?’

‘Whaddaya mean?’

I tried another tack. ‘What Is Cool?’ I shouted into the wind.

‘What’s cool? Oh, I dunno, like, skaters and stuff, you know? Like, the X Games! That’s cool!’

Bingo! Time to slip in a marketing question. No one would ever notice. ‘What was the last consumer durable you purchased?’

‘Whaaaah?’

‘What was the last thing you bought with a plug on it?’

My TV career proved short-lived, but as lay-offs weren’t yet in vogue, David quietly demoted me to tagger-alonger. In my stead, he hired a dreadful little man who dressed up like a ladybird and went round hitting people with a balloon, all his own idea. I trudged around after them, slowly accruing my twenty-five dollars an hour. When the X Games drew to a close, I approached the Create! employment agency. ‘Nothing today,’ they chirped, ‘but soon! Check in every day!’

Three weeks later, they dredged up something, and I went downtown to a swanky ad agency. There, a man with curly red hair sat me down and spoke as though we were planning an air raid. ‘Thanks for coming in at the last moment, Linda.’

I tried to look as though I had something better to do. ‘That’s all right.’

‘Excellent. So, here’s the deal. Our client wants two options for this campaign, and we’ve already come up with the ideal solution.’ He held up a drawing-pad with a blue scribble on it. I inspected it and raised my eyebrows appreciatively. ‘Nice …’

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘However, we need to offer them something else, something that’s not so hot, so they get the impression they’re choosing the ideal solution. And that’s where you come in.’

I was confident that I could create something truly second-rate.

Next, Create! got me an interview for a permanent job with the brand-new interactive wing of a global ad agency. The creative director hired me on the spot. ‘Great portfolio,’ he said. ‘Sharp. Edgy. I like it.’ His judgement was awry, but I ran off a-sparkle, rushing into Jack’s arms with the good news.

‘Fifty bucks an hour?’ He beamed. ‘Full time? That’s great!’ He lifted me off my feet for an extra big hug. ‘I’m so proud of you!’

‘I’m so proud of me too!’

We went out to dinner to celebrate. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I really didn’t want to come over here to San Francisco. And things have been pretty difficult so far. It was the worst time of my life, being here without you. But now I’m thinking that maybe we did the right thing after all.’ He polished off his third whisky.

‘I’m sorry I made you do it, Chief. I’m sorry I uprooted you from everything. I know you had a terrible time.’

‘That’s all right, Bun. We’re together now and it’s working out. Shall we get salmon-skin rolls? With little bits of lettuce for you?’

Things were looking up – we’d got ourselves a sun-drenched, overpriced pad with a palm-tree in the garden, and Jack was already bringing in enough to support us both. Viewing life as a ladder we couldn’t fall off, we threw away our savings on designer sunglasses, roller-blades and CDs.

Sadly, life at the cutting edge of interactive advertising proved to be a lot like freelancing in London, except I couldn’t get a single word approved. After two weeks I’d been given nothing to work on except the subject line for a single spam email.

 See the potential. Reflect on your growth.

 A moment’s reflection.

 A lifetime’s growth.

 See your reflection; reach your potential.

 Your potential is reflected right here.

 Extraordinary potential. Time to reflect?.

 Time to reflect on extraordinary potential.

I passed my latest sheet to Slim, the head of copy. ‘Yeah!’ he said, nodding. ‘Nice work! There are some really strong lines in here.’

‘That’s good,’ I said, breaking a smile. ‘I was beginning to think —’

‘Yeah, you’ve nearly got it.’

‘Nearly?’

‘Yeah.’

My buttocks clenched inside my nice pants. ‘So, um, how do I actually Get It?’

‘Hmm.’ He tapped his chin. ‘I’d say … focus on the concept of “Extraordinary”.’

I trudged back to my borrowed desk. Slumping in my ergonomic chair, I began to type yet again.

 Reflect on extraordinary growth potential.

 Reflect on potential extraordinary growth!

 Reflecting extraordinary potential growth?

 Extraordinary potential: growth-reflecting.

 Extraordinary potential for reflecting growth.

 Potential growth reflecting the extraordinary.

 Growth potential reflecting the extraordinary.

 Extraordinary reflecting potential = growth!

 Grow extraordinary reflecting potential.

 Extraordinary! Reflect your growth potential.

 Potential: reflect your growth. Extraordinary!

 Reflect potential for growth: Extraordinary!

 Reflecting truth growing potenti …

Why didn’t they get a computer to generate this stuff? It wouldn’t need its own ergonomic chair. I stood up and went to lunch.

As I ate my rice pudding, I calculated that if Slim ever accepted one of my sentences, it would have cost the company five hundred dollars a word. Considering this, I felt bad about downloading so many knitting patterns. It was time for some straight talk, so back at the office I collared the creative director.

‘You’re doing fine,’ he purred, stroking his plastic hair. ‘There’s plenty of work. Just a bit sporadic. Start-ups.’ Then he ducked into the loo.

The veneer began to disintegrate before my eyes, and I realized quickly that nobody else was doing any work either. Though the CEO kept making references to the future, he wouldn’t give an exact date. We were ‘temporarily’ housed in a low-slung attic above a Chinese restaurant, with threadbare carpets and exposed wiring. Of course, we’d move into a marble palace ASAP, and I’d have my own ergonomic desk, chair and computer, but in the meantime would I mind squatting in the lobby over that big, dark stain? I stared out into the limitless azure beyond the murky windows, then followed my instincts and walked out.

As soon as I got home, I called Jack. ‘I couldn’t bear it any more, Chief. I told them where to stick it – under G for Goodbye. Actually, I said I had another job, which isn’t really lying – it’s referring optimistically to a future state. You don’t mind, do you?’

‘No, Bunny, I don’t want you to suffer. No point us both having a stupid job that we hate. You’ll get something much better.’

In fact, I didn’t. There was no word from Create! and I began to give up hope. I started making elaborate food, reading French and lounging around the house a lot; things got so desperate that I started reading the paper. Not the news part, of course – just the column with the sex tips. ‘A gentleman props himself up on his elbows,’ it said. That was an option? I liked being squashed, but Jack was really heavy, and I couldn’t breathe properly, and after a while the sweat made those farty sounds … But hang on, wasn’t I supposed to be moaning, or something, sort of spontaneously? I just didn’t have it in me, especially now that Prozac had me numb from the waist down. Oh, well, I suppose the occasional orgasm was a fair trade for the soft padding inside my skull. I put down the paper and got to work on a song, and by the time I’d finished, Jack came home with a bunch of irises. ‘Hi, Bun!’ he said. ‘Writing a ditty?’

‘Yup.’

‘Great. What’s it about?’

‘That girl at work you want to fuck up the arse.’

‘What – Gayle?’

‘Yeah, it’s about Gayle.’

‘But you haven’t met her.’

‘I’ve seen her from a distance.’

‘Let’s hear it, then.’

‘You might not like it.’

‘I’m sure I’ll like it. Go on.’

I cleared my throat.

All Made Up

Though her hair is blonde, she dyes it blonder, Sticks plastic to her eyelids to make her lashes longer. Her skin is almost perfect, though she covers it in crap, She is carefully creating a reality gap.

Beneath it all, she’s a natural girl, Only pretending to be fake, Trying to cope in a threatening world And claim her share of the cake.

Though she is a good girl, she dresses like a whore. It’s good to leave your audience wanting more.

She covers up her shyness with ultra-padded bras, Add two little bits of sponge and men start seeing stars.

Beneath it all, she’s a natural chick, Only pretending to be fake. The hypocrisy of her life makes her sick But there seems so much at stake! Though naturally honest, she acts a little sly. People seem to like it, she doesn’t wonder why. She really isn’t stupid, but never lets it show, Perhaps her mind is addled; her friends would never know.

Beneath it all, she’s a natural dame, Only pretending to be fake, Thinks inside she is still just the same, But she’s making a big mistake.

Jack stood up and crossed his arms. ‘That’s really mean.’

‘It’s not mean, it’s insightful.’

‘Gayle’s really cool.’

‘No, she’s not. She’s a faux-tart.’

‘I’m going out for a smoke.’

‘You said you were going to stop. You promised.’

‘Christ, leave me alone, would you?’ He slammed the door behind him, and I sat down on the bed, ablaze with righteousness and embarrassment.

Back at work the next day, he sat in his office, having a think. Left alone in the US, he’d found himself a job, a home and even some new friends. The truth was, I wasn’t actually necessary. This small but elemental groundshift had caused fissures to appear in our love, and as the relief of reunion ebbed away, they were becoming apparent. Were they structural, he wondered, or superficial? He took another toke on the office bong and Gayle tottered in. Her easy laugh, deft compliments and tight skirt helped him come to a conclusion, which he shared with me after we’d finished dinner that night. No point spoiling a good lasagne.

‘That was lovely, Lins,’ he said, clearing his plate. ‘Listen, I’ve been thinking.’

‘What about?’ I asked. ‘Presents for me?’

‘No, I’m serious. I’m sorry, but I think that, fundamentally, you’re not good enough for me. You don’t care enough about other people, and you aren’t motivated to do good.’

That stopped me in my tracks. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, like at that first place we lived in. You hated everyone.’

‘They were awful.’

‘No, they were just different from you.’

‘Yes. They were awful.’

‘Tova, for instance: she’s really quite sweet. And Gayle – she’s a nice girl, you just don’t know her.’

‘I don’t want to know her.’

‘You’re always looking at people in the worst light.’

My defences began to give way. ‘I suppose so …’

‘And you’re not kind to people in shops. Like that waitress the other day.’

‘She was being stupid.’

‘You think you’re being assertive but you’re just being mean. I dunno, Lins. It’s, well … The people I’m meeting at work are happy to get along with each other, and they’re not so judgemental, you know? They’re just real people.’

Now I was on the attack. ‘What the fuck’s a “real person”?’

‘You know what I’m talking about.’

‘You said they were homogenous androids.’

‘That’s what I thought at first, but I don’t want to approach life like that any more. I don’t want to think the way you do … Don’t cry, Lins. It’s— There are so many things. Like with money. You always think people are out to rip you off. You don’t want me to buy drinks and you always fuss at the tips I leave.’

‘Jack, it’s like you have this inferiority complex and have to prove you’re not mean. You can’t set foot in a bar without spending a hundred dollars, and we can’t afford it.’

‘Look, I know it’s hard for you, with the way your family is, but I think you’re —’

‘What?’

‘Morally inadequate.’

I was quiet for a bit. I had been brought up to expect the worst from life and the people in it. Jack might have been mad from time to time, but he was decent and friendly to people when he was sober. I didn’t know what to do so I ran, sobbing, from the flat. It was exhilarating at first, but I soon felt the wind whipping through my rabbit-print pyjamas. And these were tough hills to negotiate in slippers.

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