I Don't Want to Go to the Taj Mahal

  Published by Repeater Books

  An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd

  Unit 11 Shepperton House

  89-93 Shepperton Road

  London

  N1 3DF

  United Kingdom

  www.repeaterbooks.com

  A Repeater Books paperback original 2020

  1

  Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Copyright © Charlie Hill 2020

  Charlie Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  ISBN: 9781912248988

  Ebook ISBN: 9781912248995

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd

  It’s all a muddle in my head, graves and nuptials and the different varieties of motion.

  How hideous is the semicolon.

  Samuel Beckett

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Acknowledgements

  I was born in a hospital in the Black Country while my family lived in a house in Birmingham; not quite one thing nor the other then, a state that neither mattered nor was the half of it. My elder sister resented my presence, my younger brother had blue eyes and curly blond hair.

  On Sunday evenings, before or after tea, we’d all sit in front of the fire and watch a BBC serial with bonnets and sideburns and Mum would provide us with plates of pilchard sandwiches. She was the daughter of a vicar who sent his sons to private school — with the aid of some sort of subsidy — and was always defending herself against attacks on the middle class. The ongoing discussions were rarely edifying and often a source of confusion. “We were poor,” she said once at a family do, “so poor we couldn’t even afford a television.” And then, “I’ll always remember the vicarage at Taddington. It had this enormous staircase with these great sweeping banisters that we used to slide down.”

  Dad, who was the first of his family to go to university and whose grandad worked in an abattoir punching cows, had always been sporty when beer was involved and tried to instil in my brother and I a love of walking. In this he was equivocally successful. Sometimes we went in the summer, to blue hills on the Welsh border, with heather and bilberries, and we’d use a walking stick to play golf with dried-up balls of sheep shit.

  One February, we went north to mountains. The Honister Pass was wet and laceratingly cold and there were boulders looming and duplicitous underfoot. “OK, I think it’s time to check the map,” said Dad, an unheard-of turn of events. He opened one up with some difficulty and it dissolved in the wind and the sleet, and although he fed us a tin of sardines, we continued to cry.

  One year we won a goldfish at the Mop. The Mop was a fair, or fayre, held in once-proud Kings Norton since Medieval times, with bumper cars and merry-go-rounds and pop music. There were men in blousons with perms and earrings smoking cigarettes and we were lured by a spit-roasted pig. We didn’t get any of the delicious, unctuously fatty pork — in a floury bap with crackling and apple sauce and stuffing — and neither Mum nor Dad trusted the men in the blousons; by the time we got it home the goldfish was dead.

  I read Billy Bunter as a boy, so was pleased to pass the eleven-plus and go to Camp Hill Grammar School, where they still played fives. It didn’t work out. My declensions were ropey, my maths even more so. In the second year, I opened a book on a fight between the cock of my junior school — in a dukes-up style — and a kid from Alum Rock. Alum Rock was deprived but I’d never heard of it so I made my man 1-4 on and the other kid 8-1 against, odds for which there were many takers. The fight lasted as long as it took for the kid from Alum Rock (look it up) to walk up to my man and drop the nut on him, a simple enough gambit that left me one shortly-to-follow indiscretion from being asked to leave by mutual consent.

  Another school, an enormous comp in Sheldon — Tacchini, Farahs, Wham!, Durannies — where my dad taught and could ‘keep an eye’ on me (best of luck with that). As an ex-grammar school boy from the other side of the city, who had a posh name and a dad at the school, I was frequently involved in fisticuffs, but the school was mixed which was better, at least to a point. A girl in the year below provided a bedroom for friends of hers who wanted to do it. She sorted me out but it wasn’t satisfactory; I wanted to take her ice skating at the Silver Blades and she never knew.

  In 1983, aged thirteen, I campaigned for the Labour Party, shinning up lampposts and schlepping round the council estates of Northfield espousing unilateral nuclear disarmament, a fool’s errand. I read An Introduction to Marxism, which I bought from a shifty looking comrade at The Other Bookshop in Digbeth and went on lots of marches and rallies — Digbeth, Clapham Common, Hyde Park — to register my disapproval of the continued imprisonment of the Birmingham Six, apartheid and weapons of mass destruction. When the miners went on strike, I threw my lot in with them too and wore a ‘Coal not Dole’ sticker to school. I was delighted when a teacher asked me to take it off, bemused by the indifference of my fellow students; when I gave cup-a-soups to people collecting outside the Sainsbury’s in Kings Heath some people looked furious, which was a lot better.

  In Northfield, after treading on a six-inch nail, I considered my injury a wound of war. I was, I suspect, insufferable on the quiet.

  For a while I played league basketball in a team full of twenty-somethings, run by a drinking mate of my dad. Every outfit in the league was sponsored by GKN or the University of Birmingham or somesuch, whereas we got by with home-stitched kit and a free monthly shish from the Grand Tandoori on the Stratford Road. We played in an old school gym in Sparkbrook. There were a couple of Rastas in the team, a jailbird and a black Muslim; they lived in Sparkbrook and Highgate and called their home the ghetto. At thirteen I qualified as a referee and whistled the England captain at a tournament in Caister; later, I smoked my first weed, bought Rudie and People Get Ready from Don Christies up the market and told my dad in the middle of a row that “I-Man apologise to no one!”, a mercifully short-lived horror.

  The Grand Tandoori kept getting promoted — the University of Birmingham didn’t like playing jailbirds in a Sparkbrook school gym — until we were two divisions away from the Birmingham Bullets, then I was made Treasurer and we folded.

  At fourteen or fifteen I was on a number 11 bus coming back from a meeting organised by Trotskyists at the Summerfield Centre on the other side of the city, when a girl got on. She was my age or thereabouts and was wearing a sweater dress in brown and yellow stripes, not that I notice clothes. She sat opposite me and I glanced at her, then stared and she stared back, I mean sometimes I’d have a look at some heartfelt papers in a folder and sometimes she’d half turn away but we both kept staring. After twenty minutes, I had to get off the bus. I smiled at her and she smiled at me. I got off the bus. The bus carried on. I sprinted across the park and up the hill to the next-but-one stop, desperate to get back on the bus — what had I done? — and got there just in time to see it pull away.

  I needed to toughen up a bit as I liked my hair long, so I joined a boxing club in Kings Norton where I sparred with the area champion — Wayne of Wayne and Dean Beach f
ame — to no avail; after I hit him in the face with a perfect jab I apologised and had to stop going. Later, I went to a youth club in Pool Farm which was rough as old cocks and razed to the ground by ungrateful Pool Farm youth.

  Another bus — a 45 maybe, or 47 — and I reconsider my involvement in organised politics. Our local Labour Party Young Socialists branch, which comprises half a dozen committed arty types and meets upstairs at the Dog and Partridge in Selly Oak, is run by Socialist Action, a coterie of the earnest and intellectually compromised. Recently, it has been infiltrated by two members of Militant, who have travelled down from Liverpool in smart clothes. We don’t like Militant — we consider them earnest and intellectually compromised — but we are flattered by their attention.

  On this particular afternoon, the bus is full and me and the Militants are standing in the aisle. They are talking, quietly but firmly, about how our branch needs to be restructured. I sympathise cheerily — “Still! After the revolution, eh?” — and they look over their shoulders, consumed by fury, and hiss at me to keep my voice down, like someone is remaking Doctor Zhivago.

  When I was supposed to be seeing a careers advisor, I drank Pernod with a mate because I didn’t believe in them. He played me the Smiths, which I didn’t get, and The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades by Timbuk 3. Although he lived just up from the Radleys, in Sheldon, he was a vegetarian except for Worcestershire sauce which he put on his cheese on toast, a compromise I simultaneously understood and didn’t (“What’s an anchovy?”)

  Later, I spent time in the library, playing poker for money with a Sikh who used to steal perfumes from his parents’ shop and sell them on. He had a fancy sports bag — Lacoste — and could afford to lose, whereas I was smarter than he was and a bluffer and skint and considerably down when we were suspended.

  I leave school at sixteen and get a job in the fish market and my granny thinks I’ve found my niche. We drink tea out of tannin-tarred mugs and soak them in bleach until Monday. An old fella passes our stall most days, puts his hand in his trouser pocket and jiggles it about a bit. “Guess which band?” he says, “The Rolling Stones!” I am taught to shout “Ee ar then, let’s have a go!” at anyone who wanders into earshot and to match a demographic to a fish: old people like cod’s roe, people with cats buy coley — “Hello love! Have you got a cat?” — posh women, salmon. On my way home after work, my fish-gut-fish-head-old-fish reek clears the top deck of the bus. I am on a Youth Training Scheme which only pays a packet of Superkings on top of my dole — and there are no Saturdays off — but at least I am part of something: Fish is the Future! I am also A Worker, not that I talk about such things — my fellow YTS’ers having little interest in the idea — until I am sacked for taking a Saturday off.

  At the Stirchley Co-op I sometimes worked in the warehouse with a fella who liked a smoke and wished he’d been old enough to fight in Vietnam, but mainly I played a lot of pool. When I was younger my paternal grandad built us a table-top table out of chipboard, and I was good. During our fifteen-minute morning break, me and Al from Fish used to get through three games: a break, a grannying; a break, a grannying, a break, a grannying. Al was one of The Lads, with whom I did the gallon at the Red Lion. We ate at Yassers and travelled to Amsterdam in a minibus, at least until we fell out after a fancy dress party at a working man’s club, where Big Daddy broke up a fight between Stevie Wonder and an alien and Yogi Bear kicked Zorro in the bollocks.

  One of the part-timers who worked on the tills was a girl who went to university. She had an Irish name and wore black tights and I had something to prove so I asked her, “Is that with a dh at the end?” It took me some time to realise that the look on her face — which I had taken to be hauteur and a challenge — was in fact disdain.

  Up the road, in a terraced house, someone’s parents weren’t in and they were having a party. Instead of getting things out, they’d put them away and the living room was empty except for a singular atmosphere. We sat on sofas and there was a rug in the middle of the floor and a girl started kissing me. “Do you want to do it right here?” she said, and I didn’t know what she meant. Then I realised she meant right there and I didn’t so I left, not that anyone was happy about it.

  I spent a year drinking in the Breedon Bar in Cotteridge, a biker’s pub where everyone took the labels off their Newkie Brown, so they’d know which bottle was theirs. My mate was Jock Rob, who came from Gorebridge, a village just outside Edinburgh. He had no front teeth and used to play in the sewers. Another friend was planning a job and asked me if I knew anything about safe-breaking, not that I believed him, although he was subsequently nicked for something to do with an acetylene torch and did some time.

  Aroundabout then, acid house reached Birmingham. Rob drank cider with speed and took me to the Hummingbird in Digbeth for an all-night party to which I wore my basketball boots as I thought they looked cool. I didn’t understand the music — it seemed a bit repetitive — and couldn’t work out why everyone else was spending so much time dancing and not taking advantage of the all-night bar. I drank until I fell asleep in front of an enormous speaker stack, and woke to find that someone had tied my laces together.

  I start playing cricket for a pub in Moseley — the Prince of Wales — and meet a fella from Glasgow who dresses like Lenny Kravitz and can bat a bit. Despite eating pickled eggs and drinking beer before we start, we take things seriously: we play in public parks against teams whose opening bowlers play for Pakistan International Airlines and are shit-off-a-shovel, and eventually we win the league. One of our number is a Yorkshireman with a short fuse who I discover, thirty years later, was a mate of Jean Baudrillard and translated him into English.

  At Peter’s Library Service, where I entertained school librarians buying children’s books — in clothes bought with a credit card from Jeff Banks off the Clothes Show (a boom! a boom!) — I wasn’t on a lot of money. When I’d taken what I owed from my take home, I rarely had enough for beer, food, travel and rent, so one month I devised an investment plan and put what I had left on the horses, eight bets spread throughout the day. My chosen nags were not electrifyingly quick and seemingly oblivious to my financial acumen: by the last race I had won nothing. Then Hinari Televideo came in at 20-1 — I had a fiver each way — so I went down the pub.

  This went on for a year or so, then we moved premises. The old place was bought by the Royal Ballet and knocked down. Shortly before it was decided by Peter’s Library Service that my vocation lay outside library supply, I went drinking with the unpackers — a member of the BCFC Zulu firm who drank up the White Hart in Chelmsley Wood and talked of ‘generals’, and a fella obsessed with the penises of Hemingway and Fitzgerald — broke into the building site and tried to start a crane after dark.

  Working in a Victorian factory in Digbeth that made pelmets and curtain accessories, I bet every day with poor Irishmen in Bartletts bookies. During my first shift, I noticed a strong smell of almonds so I asked the gaffer, a bull of a man with mildewed suit cuffs and dried egg yolk on his tie, what it was. He pointed to two enormous open vats in the middle of the floor and said, “Those are cyanide baths,” and I heard them hissing.

  I worked with a Brummie who supported Lincoln City — “Because you can get closer to the action than at a First Division club” — and he was astute. Seeing that my heart lay in something other than counting tunnel brackets, he bet me a fiver he could count more in a day, a challenge I accepted, once at any rate.

  Later I volunteered to drive a forklift, because it was the best of a shit job. All of the weight in a forklift — the battery, the engine — is at the rear end. Like a child in a toy I reversed it down a ramp, the weight took it out of my control and it toppled slowly off the edge. The only thing that stopped the forklift from going over on its side, with me underneath, crushed bones into concrete, was a metal post that bent to 45 degrees and left it balancing on the edge of the ramp like a metaphor, not that I had much time for metaphor at Harrison Drape.


  I am a Christmas temp at H. Samuel, the high street jeweller, where a fella called Tahir puts me straight about the low quality of Pakistani gold and someone with blond hair and blue eyes — who looks after the Raymond Weils but is lacking in certain deductive skills — tries to sell me a part-share of a holiday apartment in Fuengirola.

  Another temp lives in a tower block in Five Ways. I go back to his and am told that people who use rolling tobacco in their spliffs are amateurs. At lunchtime I see him in the store room, filling a sports bag full of watches and alarm clocks which he later passes to an old woman, hard-bitten; if I hadn’t been stoned I might have said something to someone, though I think, in retrospect, that’s unlikely.

  Interviewed for a Registered General Nursing Diploma, I have a plan to show I’m under no illusions about how hard I’ll have to work and that I haven’t decided to do it just so I can get a qualification, although this is certainly uppermost in my mind. “I know it’s a very dirty business,” I say, “and I’m perfectly happy clearing up shit.” And then, “I mean I don’t mind clearing up shit at all, I know that’s a big part of the job. The shit.”

  “Any questions?” they ask at the end, perplexed. “Not really,” I say, persevering, about a week before I don’t get an offer because they think I have some sort of shit fetish, “I just want you to know that I don’t mind wiping bottoms and I’m prepared to get stuck in with the cleaning up of all the shit.”