I Don't Want to Go to the Taj Mahal Read online

  Back in the City of Churches, my friend leaves me his house and hops off to Bali for a couple of weeks; out exploring, I see my first ever gun and a Pacino-mound of what I am told is crystal meth. Later, I go to a party at a Housing Co-operative called Merz and decide to write about their work for my newly renamed column — ‘A View From the Bush!’ I include a joke about a murderous city-wide biker feud and when I submit the copy to the Co-op for fact-checking, they are perhaps unaware of the reach of What’s On in Birmingham and, fearing for their safety, insist I cut it out.

  In Adelaide I was licentious and chased. I met one woman in a cinema with an organ that rose out of the stage, another in the bush, another in the pool hall, one at a party organised by mental health professionals, one at the biggest indoor market in the southern hemisphere, and several down the Grace Emily — No Pokies!

  One woman, ten years my junior, worked for the South Australian Writers Centre. She asked me and a new mate round to share her pool with her and her friend. My mate drank as much as I did, read John Pilger and used to work on the oil rigs, and I said no to the invitation and he wondered why and I wasn’t sure.

  Another woman was older than me. She didn’t have a pool. One afternoon we were lying on her kitchen floor and she said she was attracted to me because she always went for people who weren’t going to be around for long. It was a sentiment I admired, even as I was weary of it too.

  Back home, a good friend fell in love with a Pole and ditched his girlfriend, who took an axe to his passport. Some months later, she and I were sharing a house in Sparkhill and got together after vodka (Pan Tadeusz, a gift); “It was like sleeping with my brother,” she said.

  My friend found out, I think she told him, the rotter. He was horrified. “How could you?” he said, “I can’t stop thinking about it, I’m losing sleep,” and I didn’t say anything but it was him who’d fallen in love with a Pole, and despite my experience of shenanigans, I was confused.

  Although I could be a rascal and sometimes a dick — consorting with gangsters in various states of mental undress, walking where you shouldn’t, at silly times of the day — I had never been knifed, a circumstance that led me to be under-cautious.

  Playing pool against a Villa fan in the back room of the Malt Shovel in Balsall Heath, I was giving a lesson, free of charge. The second time I asked him to move so I could take my shot, he picked me up by the throat and spread-eagled me on the table, his fist cocked. The balls went everywhere, there was tutting from the dons and faces lining the walls, until I said, perhaps for a reason, “That’ll be two shots to you then, mate,” whereupon the fella frowned and, processing slowly, let me go.

  A few nights later I went back to an empty pub and a pool table askew on a flaking crust of dried blood: the night after our dalliance, the fella had ground a glass into someone’s face. I knew there was risk — danger! — attached to my life on the edges of all things, I mean that was nearly the point, but not like this, and I almost wished I had some sort of alternative.

  A proper job! At Waterstones! I’m thirty-one! Now I have a debit card and everything!

  But only just. On probation, I arrive three hours late after spending a night in a patch of nettles in Cannon Hill Park (Spiritus/Poles). After running a spike a long way into my flip-flopped big toe on the building site of the new Bull Ring (short cut/high jinks), I bleed up-and-down the shop for two days. Children’s laureate, Jacqueline Wilson, comes in to do a signing, finishes her stint and joins me in waiting for the lift. With her is the store manager, who is holding a plate of triangular sandwiches. Erroneously thinking our guest has eaten, I take a bite out of four of them, one after the other, bulging my cheeks and making Homer Simpson noises for comedic effect. I put the crusts back on the tray and grin as Jacqueline Wilson’s mouth drops open, my gaffer’s too, and I decide — shitters! — to take the stairs. Later, I’m called into the manager’s office to account for my recalcitrant timekeeping and am reminded that I once suggested there had been an anthrax scare on the number 50 bus.

  However. Every time I have a staff appraisal, I skim the retail section and crib a phrase: ‘First Mover Advantage’ gets me moved up a grade and after ‘Retail is Detail!’ I am in charge of a team and encouraged to go into shop management. I consider the offer. The store manager is an ex-punk and friends with Stu Pid. The key word is ‘ex’: there is nothing punk-like about retail and although I have never been into punk, I like to think I might be punk-like, and decline.

  All of the novels at Waterstone’s front-of-store look the same, and appear to follow some sort of formula. I’m not sure any of the other thirty would-be novelists who work there have noticed this, but I think it worthy of a story — my second — which is accepted by Ambit (part-edited by J.G. Ballard!) When the story comes out I decide to turn it into a novel about books; even though I don’t know how, I know it starts with writing, so I write.

  I live next door to a pub in Balsall Heath, the Old Mo, which has a pool table upstairs. One night I run out of money and people to tap — a regular occurrence! — so I suggest a tournament, two quid in, winner takes all, for which there are twenty takers. I organise the competition over two nights — a couple of rounds there-and-then and the semis and final the following week — and spend the forty quid. In the final I am skint and go two down in a first to three, and have to work hard to avoid a beating, in both senses of the word.

  I am living above a bookies in the Parade, Kings Heath. Me and my housemate, who deals drugs and collects superhero figurines and old games like Ker-Plunk in their original packaging, haven’t the money for our rent so we bet three hundred quid on England winning a football match — about which we know nothing — which they do in the last minute.

  One afternoon, I take a call. “Bloody hell,” I say as I hang up, “that was the Independent on Sunday. I offered them one of my reviews last week and they want it.” A minute later, my housemate takes a call. “Bloody hell,” he says as he hangs up, “that was the Tweenies. They’re playing the NEC and they need eight grams of coke in forty-five minutes.”

  Denny was a security guard at Waterstone’s and everybody loved him because he was smiley and quite possibly the only black man they had ever chatted to. He complained of a bad back for a week and then died of a heart attack. There was a three-line whip for the funeral but I wasn’t good at such things and didn’t know him well enough to go, a decision that was remarked upon in a subsequent staff meeting. “Thanks to everyone who came to Denny’s funeral,” said the manager, “it’s a pity not everyone could make the effort.” After I’d thought about this comment for a while — was it to do with strengthening our corporate identity? An observation on the right way to grieve? — I realised it was wrong.

  Bank holiday, the New Moseley Arms, a pub with knives, rammed. There are lots of people I know from the old days, sort of, now moved on and touring. I play pool, keep the table for a run of games until I am knocked off by a woman who is a friend of lots of people I sort of know from the old days. She doubles the black. “Don’t take him home,” they warn, but she does; the next morning she makes me a bacon sandwich.

  A week later I am on the other side of town shopping for my signature dish — smoked haddock, spinach and yellow split peas, with lots of coriander and lemon — which I am cooking for us. I bump into one of her friends who frowns, has a look at the time and says, “You’d better get a move on,” and I do.

  I think you’re too nice, I wrote, and she wrote back, I’ll show you nice. Over the years she has been true, at various times, to all possible readings of her words.

  “Do you need some extra cash?” said a friend, and we always did, so I was paid to put together a ten-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. It was for an artist called Ian Skoyles who took puzzles apart, section-by-section, before reassembling them to create new composite images. The jigsaw went to the edges of the table in the living room of the terraced house on Grange Road, where me and my girlfriend used to eat our tea; it stimu
lated conversation then filled-up the space the conversation left with malignant detritus. We argued over who was doing — or should do — most of the work, drew up rotas and ignored them; every time we left the house we felt guilty, so we tried to entice visitors: “It’s great fun!” I said, but I was lying and people stopped visiting. The money was OK for art but poor and I never got to see the work in which the sections of our jigsaw appeared.

  Passing through Zakopane before a wedding in a forest outside Svidník in Slovakia, we stay in the sloping wooden home of the artist Witkacy. Witkacy believed in something called ‘catastrophism’ and shot himself in the head on the eve of the Russian invasion of Poland, an idea and sequence of events I am interested in. Leszek, a glassblower, is indignant: “Why do you want to talk about this? I don’t want to talk about this!” and I agree to a point, I mean maybe you can have too much context.

  I have a son, and the bookshop give me a crate of wine as a leaving present. On my last day I am Duty Manager and sit on the roof of the shop sluicing, with staff invited-up floor-by-floor. I look out over the city at sunset and say farewell to everything that’s gone, whatever it may be.

  I get married soon after. I’m not convinced by any of this but am interested in the idea of flipping a switch and renewing myself and in confounding the assumptions of others and am talked into giving it a go, I mean the time might be right to give it a go: after all, I have a family and I love it with a love that is no part of any of this, a love that lives where all else vanishes or is unreal.

  So is that it? Is the switch flipped? Can a switch be flipped? Can I put a stop to this questing — for what? — to this ineffable want, this nameless need? Can I be renewed? What was I and what will I become? (I mean it is flipped, isn’t it?)

  I finish my novel about books. It has taken me a long time. I try to get it published and am buoyed by the responses of publishers who don’t publish it. I start a second novel, based loosely on my twenties in Moseley, during which time I heard much talk of The Great Moseley Novel; whatever else, my effort will not be that.

  I finish my second novel in about a year and find a small publisher for it. I have no aptitude for design and help to design the cover but it doesn’t matter, I am now a novelist.

  There is a lot of curmudgeon surrounding my publication deal, some of it from those who have me down as an incorrigible pisshead, some of it from those who talked in the past about writing The Great Moseley Novel. “It won’t change anything,” says an old friend and writer, and although this is curmudgeonly and the papers like my style, it is almost certainly veracious too.

  I have a novel out — does this make me a novelist? I’m not sure, I mean I quite fancy the idea but hate it at the same time. Either way, for various reasons not unconnected to high blood pressure and dudgeon, I fall out with the Birmingham Literary Festival and decide to grow the brand — a tricky one! — by alternative means. I join Twitter — a stab at affirmation that doesn’t go well with wine — and set up a rival do with fellow writer Andy Killeen, who has published a novel set in eighth-century Baghdad. The festival takes place in the back garden of the Prince of Wales pub in Moseley. It is not awash with cash, although we do pay fees, and our guests include Joanne Harris, Stewart Home, Andrew Davies, Kit de Waal, Alison Moore and Natalie Haynes, who variously ask to be paid with a bottle of single malt, read standing on their head and are accosted by a Villa fan enjoying an afternoon of lager — “Am I supposed to know who you are?”

  My involvement in the festival results in few sales of my book, and although I am now a ‘Director’ on LinkedIn, it takes up the time I could be writing, so I knock it on the head.

  I am in the park with my son after playgroup, chatting to a woman I knew a bit ago, courtesy of a housemate who didn’t head-the-ball. I ask my son, who is kind and gentle and loves ants, “Do you want to say hello?” and he toddles off in the direction of the woman’s daughter. When the woman frowns and says, “He’s not going to rugby tackle her is he?” I am overcome by something that I hope is merely frustration but might also be despair.

  Now a baby girl, another never-ending new. Soon there is a photograph that will be forever in my head, of son and daughter leaping into the air above a meadow, waving sticks, suspended between sky and earth.

  After playgroup, I am blue-lighted in agony with a twisted gut, a gut that is dead. I vomit farmyard gushes of backed-up bright green semi-fecal matter and am told that if I’d arrived twenty minutes later I’d have ceased to exist. Cut open, and prone in a pit of bleeping drips, the drugs and the madness are strong. My wife brings me a two litre bottle of sparkling water. “He can’t have that,” says a nurse or doctor, “he’s nil by mouth, we need to drain his stomach or he will die.” My wife takes the bottle, puts it in the cupboard by the bed. That night something kicks-in, the antithesis of a survival instinct — or is it? — a stubbornly contrary go-my-own-way-ness. I retrieve the bottle and drink the fizzy lot, and it is a month before I am allowed home.

  Novel number two arrives, the one about books. It is a satirical rejection of the middle-of-the-road. Although I am interviewed on Radio 4 — Mariella! — I annoy a corner of the literary world in pursuit of more recognition goddammit and the consternation is existential too; I have a feeling of perpetually unfinished business, of too much to do, of time passed and time wasted, of having tied a firework to the tail of the author as bull-headed dog. Time wasted? Emphatically, resoundingly not, though you can never be sure.

  The Bookseller tweets news of Books, my second novel. Their tweet attracts a single reply: “I know him, he’s a great drunk!”

  I work part-time in the library of the University of Birmingham. I move books from one place to another and struggle with the realisation that, in this environment, books are no different to angle brackets, or pelmets.

  After shinning-up Conic Hill on a family holiday in the Trossachs, I discovered a tic in my ankle. It was fat and bilberry-like with blood and when I tried to pull it out with a pair of tweezers it burst, spattering everywhere. Its legs were left behind, sticking out at strange angles and I didn’t have any TCP so I put some toothpaste on them even though that is supposed to work for acne.

  Either way, I was pleased. By this time, although I loved my wife and kids, my job was unsatisfactory, even poor, and I was excited at the prospect of contracting Lyme disease, which can prove fatal if not caught. It is identified by a circular red rash, like a target and quite spectacular; unfortunately, I was fine.

  I write a novella about writing and alienation that isn’t picked-up by the national press, despite harassment. Writing is making no material difference to my life so I sign-up for an MA in Creative Writing, after which I imagine I will teach Creative Writing, a defeat of many colours.

  My maternal granny was one hundred when she died. She had an unshakeable faith; the vicar who came to her parish when she was ninety-five said he found it unnerving. She loved all of us but never knew of my enthusiasm for walking in the hills so didn’t get around to teaching me the names of Corncockle or Lady’s Smock or Thrift.

  Granny lived in Lanchester in County Durham. It is bigger now than when I used to visit. We used to climb over a high wall to build dens on a disused railway line; now the wall is barely chest-height. The funeral service was at her local church. There were bell ringers from Durham cathedral and a rainbow appeared as they played. Later the vicar read a sermon he’d written, entitled Some People’s Lives are Sermons. In it he mentioned her volunteering to drive ambulances during the war and sending money to the ANC before anyone had heard of them. After the service, as the sound of the bells filled the sky above the town, everyone went to the Chapter House for tea and sausage rolls while I climbed up the nearest hill and looked down over the church. I thought about the sermon and tried to put a couple of things into some sort of perspective.

  I don’t always know what, or why, but I’ve tried, and you have to, I think. We are most of us neither one thing nor the other, in-between
allsorts, perplexed by our wants, unsure of our needs, buffeted variously — often compressed — by people and times, our delusions; some of us are interested in confounding the expectations of others and defying the world, a thankless if necessary exercise.

  A lot of men and women I know didn’t make it or, scarcely better, now shuffle red-faced with legs like sticks inside too-big jeans, god bless them — not that I’ve started believing in god. At the time of writing, I keep an axe under the bed, just in case, and am happiest listening to my son play the cello, my daughter explaining her day dreams; sometimes I update unpublishable poems about the coming apocalypses. After a lifetime of drinking tea, I have just started drinking coffee and my aim is to make it to the rank of snob in the shortest time possible: all of which is better than most of the available alternatives.

  Big Jay is a psychobilly plumber with a past, who likes to post videos on social media. Jay believes there is nothing but the material world and then death and most of his posts hymn militant atheism.

  Some are funny though, the sort of thing you might see on You’ve Been Framed: people falling over, people being hit on the head with planks, minor traffic shunts and the like. The other day I clicked on a clip on YouTube that showed a long line of traffic on an icy road. It looked promising. A car went to overtake another and skidded across the road and I steadied myself for a guffaw. Coming the other way was a lorry with a three-storey cab doing sixty or more and when it hit the car side on, the car disintegrated, I mean it just disappeared, there was nothing left, and I sat there unable to move or comprehend what I had just seen or why.