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CHAPTER FIVE BEING IS OTHER PEOPLE

I hate January. It’s such a dark and dreary downer of a month. Perpetually cold, dully predictable, a constant reminder that life is all just little bits of history repeating.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the last couple of weeks have been marked by great swathes of languorous self-pity. After an exciting start, things have slowed down, dramatically.

I’m currently working on a website for a city council in the north of England writing words about Local Finance, Multiple-Occupancy Homes, Sheltered Housing, and Health & Social Care. I wish I could say it’s as interesting as it sounds, but it really isn’t. Not by a long chalk. This month is going so slowly…

The last couple of weeks have staggered by like a frozen hare tied to a dispirited tortoise, and my coccyx steadfastly refuses to heal. I want to run! Stretch! Play tennis! Dance!—but all I can manage is to sit here on a large disc made out of sponge, the kind favoured by old men with haemorrhoids. I think I might be getting haemorrhoids. The ailment of stretched mothers and desiccated old men. I have an itch. A terrible itch. Added to which, this dieting lark is deeply, shockingly tedious. I miss the quick-fix fun of fat, sugar, and cholesterol. I miss eating whenever I feel like it, blithe as a billygoat.

I bought a set of digital scales and now, every morning when I rise, every evening when I set, and seven or eight times in between, I hoist myself upon this instrument of despair and stare at the pithy display. Invariably I shake my head. My weight has started to fluctuate wildly, up and down like the lift in a kangaroo’s whorehouse. Last week I ate nothing but carrots, peas, apples, bananas, and wine, and on Friday I was seven pounds lighter than at the start of the week. Then at the weekend I pigged out on pizza, beer, and exotically flavoured crisps, and as a direct consequence, five of those seven pounds are right back where they started. What can it all mean?

And what’s it all about? Why am I making my life so much harder? I ask myself that question and for a moment I do not know the answer. Then it comes flooding back. I am pursuing a healthy lifestyle, so that I can transform myself into a healthier human being, and somewhere along the way, find myself a lady. A lovely lady at that. One with silken skin and leathery skirts. Or vice versa. One who would make me giddy with adoration and fill my nether regions with hot sticky blood and fizz-gristle. A lady to laugh with and love with, to have and to hold, to tickle and tether from this day forth, as long as we both shall live. Or at least for a couple of months, till the inevitable withering and/or betrayal. A lady, in fact, like Ange. Ange is my inspiration. My first love. They never die, you know. And Ange is making great efforts to keep in touch. She has pledged to help me all she can to stick to my various regimes. She has pledged her support. ‘Day or night,’ she said, ‘if you need to talk to someone, I’m here for you. Don’t…why are you looking at me like that?’

I blushed, smiling. ‘Like what? I just…’

‘I’m not going to have sex with you, Stan. Sorry if that’s not what you were thinking, but that’s what it looked like.’

That was what I was thinking.

‘That’s not what I was thinking,’ I said. ‘I’m just glad we could finally be friends is all.’

I once wrote a poem about Ange’s breasts. It was called ‘Two-Headed Love God’.

Ange is adorable and vivacious and dangerous and, I’m hoping, just mad enough to get really drunk one night and sleep with me. She was mad enough, after all, to lick her lips at me, moaning that she wanted me, that time after assembly, while her friends screeched their ghastly passerine approval and I let out an audible cry of terror.

Aaah, how many times have I permitted my hands to seduce myself to generous, wilfully erotic adaptations of that painful memory? I don’t know. Twelve or so.

The last time was on Sunday night, when I bottomed out after having spent the day before with Keith, boozing and smoking weed like know-nothing losers with nothing but time. Then I’d fallen into a feeding frenzy. Most of Sunday I’d spent in bed, beached and buried in shame. Then I got up, weighed myself, and fell face first into a bubbling well of despair. I would like to blame Keith, but I can’t bring myself to do it. In truth, Keith is blameless. Perennially so.

Keith is my oldest friend, my dearest friend. I’m not so sure how mature it sounds to still cling to the concept of a ‘best friend’, but maybe that’s because most adults are not so sure if they have them any more. I am sure. Keith is my best friend.

I’ve known him since I was just a few months old. Our parents’ back gardens bordered for a while and Keith and I became fast friends and grew up together. Because I was a hideous eczematic little freak, I was often picked on and bullied by clear-skinned Nazi kids, and I have lost count of the number of times that Keith stepped in and stopped the violence. Or tried to. He did take the occasional beating alongside me too, which produced in me such profound feelings of love that I suppose it’s fair to say that over the years I developed a bit of a crush on him. But it passed, it passed.

When we were about twelve or thirteen, Keith and I were enjoying a day out on the beach at Southend with a couple of distant schoolfriends, ‘Dirty’ Dean Curtis and Kevin ‘Hodge’ Hodge. Hodge found a giant flatfish washed up on the sand, dead. When he picked it up and threatened me with it, I ran. Hodge ran after me. I got away, though, because somehow I was faster than him. Then, in the same way that gunmen in films shoot at cars speeding off in the distance, more last-ditch desperation than genuine attempt to find their target, Hodge threw the fish after me, and by utter fluke, it landed with a slap on my bare back, where it stuck fast, suckered to my skin. It was funny. I can see now that it was funny, but at the time it was a) humiliating, as my friends all fell about laughing, and b) somehow terrifying. I started screaming and flapping about trying to get it off my back, but it was properly stuck. This was probably the nearest I’d ever come at the time to a panic attack.

Despite my shrieks and shouts and tears, Hodge and Dirty Curty found it increasingly hilarious. Keith, however, seeing that I was genuinely upset, came up to me, peeled the fish off my back and calmed me down. I was embarrassed and I had to go off to be alone, but I was touched too, and I’ve never forgotten it.

When I was fifteen, there was violence at home. Tempers were lost and blood was spilt and suddenly there was the possibility that I was going to be taken into care. Keith at this point persuaded his parents to take me in and look after me, essentially to foster me. Again, it brings tears to my eyes to think how much that meant to me and what a selfless, genuinely heartfelt gesture it was.

A year and a bit later, Keith and I moved into a flat together in Dartford, and without putting too fine a point on it, Keith basically mothered me for the next two years. I was in and out of college, in and out of work and often struggling to pay the rent, but Keith never failed to help me out, even when it meant leaving himself short. I wouldn’t say he always did so uncomplainingly, but that’s because he wasn’t a feckless pussy. On occasion I needed nothing more than a healthy, hefty kick in the pants, and Keith was always on hand to give it.

For my eighteenth birthday, Keith drew me a card. He had always been a very talented artist, and up until his early twenties, he drew a lot. Then he fell into a career in art direction, via set design, and kind of stopped. Which is a shame. The card he made for my eighteenth was an ink and watercolour depiction of the front cover of a novel I talked about a lot but would never write. The novel, called Irresistible, was about an ugly man who one day wakes up and—against all odds—finds that he is utterly irresistible to all women. I did manage to write a couple of chapters, and they were filled with the most hideously embarrassing teenage wish-fulfilment imaginable.

The cover on my card, however, was a thing of great beauty. It featured a brooding, saturnine version of me surrounded by what can only be described as a bevy of buxom beauties, fawning all over me, groping me, licking me, breathing me in. It was magnificent. Scantily clad they were. All adoring, imploring, and swooning. I was blown away by it, and I showed my gratitude by a) never writing the novel, and b) eventually ruining the card entirely with half a bottle of red wine. What an unbelievable klutz I am. Stupid clumsy sausage-fingered motherfucker. I hated myself for some time for that. But Keith forgave me.

Five weeks ago, he bought me a bunch of sex toys and condoms and various other sexual accessories for my birthday. He knew about my quest to change my life and find the Woman of My Dreams, and this was his way of wishing me luck. In an accompanying card, he wrote: ‘You’ll notice there is no fleshlight here. That’s because you won’t be needing one. Go get ‘em, tiger.’ I was actually very pleased at the lack of a fleshlight, because if there’d been one, I would have had to try it, and the idea of making sweet love to what is essentially a synthetic vagina in a plastic tube is singularly depressing.

A week after that, Keith invited me to spend Christmas with him at his girlfriend Patricia’s house—just him, her, and—stopping me feeling like a giant Christmas gooseberry—her two kids, Ben and Dina. I’m sure Patricia had a hand in the invitation too, of course, but the point is, in these and in countless other ways, Keith has shown me consistently that he cares for me, that he loves me, more than any other person I’ve ever known. This is why, at the weekend, it was a pleasure for me to help him paint the walls of the house he’s just moved into. Actually, ‘pleasure’ is maybe gilding the lily somewhat, but I was happy to do it.

Keith’s new place is in Peckham, which I’ve always rather imagined as the armpit of London, if not the scrotum or even the anus of London, and for most of my life studiously avoided. The time I have spent there recently has done little to disabuse me of this, but yes, OK, I suppose I must confess—despite the gobbing teens, the astonishing amount of crap in the streets and the intoxicating, God-awful stench—it does have a certain charm of which I was hitherto unaware. Exotic fruit and veg stalls, for example, a preponderance of large African men singing religious songs in the street, and yesterday I saw a Christian steel-drum trio, just playing outside a mobile-phone shop seemingly for the sheer hell of it. I guess Peckham is kind of like Brixton, but without the overweening drugginess and concomitant sense of impending violence. Oh, and without the nice places to eat and drink.

Keith’s new flat is in a state of some squalor and disrepair, a little like the entire area. It needs a lot of work, which is why we spent the weekend repainting his living room. Occasionally Keith would have to stop because of pins and needles in his right hand. Every twenty minutes or so, in fact. ‘Look,’ he’d say. I’d look but see nothing. Just a hand, not working. ‘It’s spazzing out,’ he’d say. ‘Something’s wrong with it.’ I’d shake my head. It would pass. He’d roll another joint.

I tried to make the painting into a fitness thing, so that I’d feel less bad about the tobacco intake that came hand in hand with the joints, but I failed. I felt worse still on Sunday afternoon when I woke up with a cough like a canary in a coal mine. In order to assuage some of the guilt, I fell back on childhood rituals and for old time’s sake said half a dozen Hail Marys, three Apollo Creeds, and a handful of How’s Your Fathers. But it was useless. On Sunday I hated myself. And so I regressed, albeit briefly, and lay stagnant, unstable, like a veritable sack of couch potatoes, neither use nor ornament, propped up in front of the telly, and the last thing I wanted was to speak to anyone, so when the phone rang, I let it go to answer machine. Which is when I received the following voice message from Keith:

‘All right, mate. I’ve just got this terrible feeling that you’re sitting at home moping and feeling sorry for yourself and pissed off that you pigged out yesterday. If I’m wrong and you’re right as rain and off out celebrating your joy, then I’m happy to be so wrong. But if I’m right, then…I dunno. Cheer up, mate! You’re allowed to treat yourself once in a while, for God’s sake. It might not be good for your diet but it’s good for your soul. Your soul! Anyway, take care and speak soon…Oh, and everybody here loves you.’

At which point, in the background, Patricia and her precocious children, Ben and Dina, all shouted, ‘We love you, Stanley!’ and laughed. ‘You see?’ said Keith. ‘Seeya later, mate. Give us a bell. Bye!’

At the time, hearing the message made me feel even more pathetic than I already felt. The idea that someone knew me well enough to know that I’d be sitting at home in a nauseating heap, too miserable to even sob, let alone pick up the phone, upset me. Am I so predictable? Is my pathetic personality so widely acknowledged?

But then, listening to the message again a few hours later made me shudder and shake with dirty great tears of something approaching joy. I think I may be slightly emotionally unstable. I think I may have to take that possibility on board.

Then, before those tears had a chance to dry, Ange called and asked me if I fancied a healthy dinner some time. I said that I most certainly did and, immediately, I got back on track with the diet—apples and lettuce and grapes, oh my—and as my weight began once again to crawl in the right direction, I began to cheer up. I started whistling again. By the time dinner at Ange’s rolled around, less than a week later, I was positively chipper, not only at the prospect of a healthy meal, but also at the prospect of spending a little more time with Ange.

I felt nervous as I was getting ready to leave the house. I shouldn’t have felt nervous. My belly was shifting around. It shouldn’t have been doing that. I couldn’t, I can’t stop thinking about how much I want Ange naked, on a bed, savaging me with her body, her cavities. I feel like I’m fourteen again, like I love her.

Halfway through the meal, the conversation turned, as conversations often do, to sex. Ange couldn’t get over the fact that I’ve only slept with two people. I couldn’t get over the fact that she’s slept with over fifty, and none of them were me.

‘It must be worse to have slept with two than with none at all,’ she said sensitively. ‘Because you know what you’re missing, don’t you?’

‘Hmm, yes. That’s very true,’ I replied. ‘Thanks for ramming that home.’

‘But how do you cope with the frustration?’ she wanted to know.

‘What makes you think I cope with it?’ I replied.

We talked about Ange’s sexual partners, her predatory maneating ways. I asked her what kind of men she liked best. She asked me what I meant. I said, ‘For example, short men or tall men?’ She told me tall men. ‘Small men or large men, cockwise?’ Large men. ‘Black men or white men?’ In response to which Ange informed me that she didn’t think she could ever sleep with a black man. Naturally, I called her on this. Specifically, I called her racist. Naturally, she denied it. ‘I just don’t find them attractive,’ she said.

‘But that’s idiotic,’ I replied. ‘It’s like saying, “I don’t find Taureans attractive” or “I don’t find lawyers attractive.” There are as many different types of black men, as many different black “looks”, as there are fish in the sea.’

‘I don’t fancy fish either,’ she said, stupidly.

‘Fair enough,’ I countered cleverly. ‘But to say you don’t fancy black men is like saying you don’t fancy freshwater fish, or you don’t fancy bream, whereas with other fish you have no problems. Or, in other words: you’re a racist.’

‘I can’t believe you’re calling me that,’ she said at this point, seemingly on the verge of becoming quite upset.

‘I can’t believe you’re being so overtly racist!’ I cried. ‘OK, let’s calm down here,’ I suggested, more to myself than to Ange. I poured some more wine. I drank some more wine. ‘What would you think,’ I said, ‘if a black man said that he refused to sleep with white women, that he just didn’t fancy white women?’

She paused, as if to suggest—at least as far as I read it—that she was about to lie. Then she lied. ‘I’d think it was fine,’ she said. ‘It’s a matter of personal taste.’

‘Hmmm,’ I said. ‘Well, it seems to me it’s personal taste informed by personal prejudice. OK, let me try another tack. Tell me—honestly now—don’t you fancy Denzel Washington?’

‘No, I don’t,’ she replied, scowling racistly as she did so.

‘OK, what about Kanye West?’