Australia

They would go for exactly one month, having husbanded their leave with rare efficiency. The flights were long-booked, internet cheap. For the first three days they knew where they were staying, and after that, they’d go where adventure took them. They had a book, and a good map, bought second hand at the local car booter. It was the map that had started it, in fact. They’d bought the map, and the map had fed the dream. They looked at the shape of the place, the size of it, and knew they had to go there.

They would travel light, be nimble. They would allow themselves five pairs of underwear each, and use laundry, or discard and replace by buying from cheap shops. (They relished the friend of a friend story of an old hippy who’d gone to the states with only one set of clothes. Each city he reached, he went to the discount store, bought new ones, binned the old ones. This, they felt, was something to aspire to.)

They were ready for this. They’d been together four years. They were both twenty-eight years old.

They had done their advanced reading, of uneven treasures truffled from second hand bookshops: Peter Carey, Richard Flanagan, Kate Grenville, David Malouf, Patrick White. Not all of these did they like. They listened to the Go-Betweens. What they looked forward to was the thought of being lost, of dusty days of driving without seeing a soul before fetching up in some hick village to drink tasteless chilled beer and amuse the locals with their accents. To be in a place at the same time parochial and continent-vast: this was what they wanted. They would occasionally seek out internet cafes, update their social network spaces, email friends with only slightly exaggerated tales from places with unlikely names. Perhaps they’d finally blog.

They wanted this to change them, to give them definition. They imagined themselves coming back sharper, surer of themselves, tanned and lean. Their outlines would be clearer; they’d leave a stronger shadow. Looking back, they’d see this as the start of being adults, they thought.

Of course it didn’t work out that way. Things rarely do. A week before, they had a nuclear level row which saw bags being packed for a different reason. He’d always had a problem with faithfulness at more than the theoretical level, and had wanted a memory to take with him on the trip. She found out, and her anger combined with his lack of contrition to take them somewhere irretrievable.

They didn’t get much back on the tickets. She boxed the books and took them down the local charity shop. She kept the map. They moved on, as people do. The years turned.

At thirty-two she got a job that took her travelling. India, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey: she liked it. She kept a list of the countries she’d visited and saw it rise towards fifty. One day, finally, Australia. She took the map with her, although she didn’t need it. Her itinerary kept her to the main cities. Work had her busy, but in the evenings she’d walk around, try to get the measure of places. Sydney she found swish, but vacuous. In Melbourne she liked the coffee and the presence of bookshops. Brisbane was a redneck city, a county town really. She drank a little too much wine, having developed a taste for fizzy shiraz, and on her second to last night in Melbourne had an unsatisfactory one-night stand with someone originally from Auckland she got talking to in a bar. They exchanged phone numbers afterwards, but only imaginary ones.

On her last day in Sydney, doing the tourist thing of looking at the opera house, she thought of him, for the first time in a couple of years. They’d have had their picture taken here, accosting a passing stranger, him pulling an ironic pose for the camera. She didn’t miss him, more her young self, or the possibilities there’d seemed to be for the two of them. They should have had that month in Australia. If the break-up hadn’t happened before, it would only have happened after. But they should have done the trip first.

So work done she headed home, feeing she still hadn’t seen Australia, and sensing she never would. The idea of it, that was the thing to hold on to.

In a Philip K Dick world

- If this was a Philip K Dick novel, what would happen next?

Although it wasn’t late, they were both lying in bed. They’d just finished sex and were hoping now to drift into sleep. It was a warm summer’s night and they had the windows open.

They could hear loud and fast footsteps echoing down the street.

- That man would knock on our door, and we’d answer, and he’d know us, but we wouldn’t know him.

- Or he’d knock on the door, and we’d answer, and he’d be confused, because his sister has been living in this house for 17 years and he saw her here only yesterday.

The footsteps went past, grew quieter as they rounded the corner, towards the station.

- Or he wouldn’t need to knock, because his key would work, and he’d want to know what we were doing in his house.

- And then he’d call the police and he’d be right.

- And as soon as he said it we’d know he was right and we’d wonder what we were doing here.

He sat up, drank some water from a glass and then lay back down, this time facing away from her.

- Or we’d answer the door, and outside would be a completely different place. We wouldn’t be on this street, or in this town, or maybe even on this planet.

- And when we turned back from the door the house would be different too.

- And there’d be different people living here and they’d want to know what we were doing here, and it would be like we’d knocked on the door of their house and were coming to see them. They’d answer the door and not let us in.

- Or it would be a hundred years in the future and we’d be remembered as the victims of a grisly murder committed a hundred years before and still talked about to this day.

He turned again to look at her. Not that they could see much of each other in the dark. He could see the curve of her shape and the gleam of her eyes.

- Isn’t that a bit too much Tales of the Unexpected?

- Yeah, you’re right. Save that one up, eh? That’s another game.

- So?

- So he comes to the door, and I get dressed, and I go and answer it. And he recognises me. He’s my husband. He’s been away. He’s been in jail. He was dangerous to the authorities. And now they’ve let him out. He’s come home for me. And he wants to know why I don’t recognise him. Because of course he thinks I must. And so he assumes the authorities have got to me. That I’m on their side. Or maybe they’ve threatened our children.

- You have children?

They didn’t.

- Yes, a boy and a girl, one of each. So he thinks maybe they’ve threatened the children. And it breaks his heart.

Silence. They lay there for a while. She sounded genuinely upset.

- Or he comes to the door, and you get dressed, and go and answer it. And you recognise him. You recognise him straight away. He’s your husband. He’s come back from jail. And instantly you’re deprogrammed. You have false memories, of a false life with me, but when you see him instantly something clicks, and you know he’s your husband. And so you let him in.

As he said this, the footsteps approached again. They got louder, then halted, and then someone knocked twice, clearly, on their front door.

Are you going to answer, he asked.

Sorry, who are you?, she asked.

Three unconnected thoughts from an old notebook

I lost my MP3 player. Without it I walked self-consciously. For the first time in years, I could hear the sound of my feet.

I played with my wedding ring. I moved it, and discovered a layer of flaking, pale skin underneath.

The floral tributes are still there, where a young life ended not so long ago, where they were forced to cancel the Olympic celebrations. I walk past them daily to and from the tube station, perturbed that I feel so little.

Kids

She doesn’t want to have kids because she fears it would change her, make her one of those selfless people who live only for and through their kids.

He doesn’t want to have kids because he fears it wouldn’t change him, and he’d stay as selfish as he is now.

Early

My flight landed first thing in the morning, and I decided to go into work. The train from Gatwick brought me into central London by seven, a time when I would normally still be in my semi-suburban home. I saw familiar surroundings at an unfamiliar hour. The sun was shining and I took my time, dropping a couple of gears down from the usual London hurry. I wheeled my case and looked at the buildings. The city is different at this time. Streets are mostly clear of people. This is the hour of the city's invisibles, the modern versions of the nightsoilmen, who go about cleaning, shining afresh all those windows in new office and retail constructions, scrubbing away the last day's detritus before the salaried reclaim the city an hour or so later. It's also London at its most migrant, and at its blackest.

Nail

On the tiny plane from Barbados to Trinidad, the man in front of me read intently. When we landed and he stood up to disembark, I saw the book was in fact an autobiography of the former actor Jimmy Nail.

This one is true.

Roots

On the Quai Grenelle in Paris the tree roots creased and folded the pavement.

Nuts

I eyed the machine at the edge of the bar. One of those hot nuts machines. No one eats those. I see them and imagine one really good, pushy salesman who did the rounds of every pub in England. Marginalised, I assumed it was defunct from disuse. But then I saw, in a quiet moment, the bloke behind the bar, solemnly unsheathing from plastic the little paper cups, and then stacking them in two piles on top of the machine. He moved paper cups from pile to pile until he had two symmetrical stacks.

I was impressed, but I resolved the next time I go in there to check the heights of those piles.

Life at the end of the line

I live at the end of the line, where slow people get off with big bags. Where aggressive migrants lurk in the exits, demanding your used daily tickets, drinking cheap cans in the face of local bans. Where once a week the police come in heavy to drive them away, occasionally searching people of a certain age and colour for knives. Where half the time you can’t get the train all the way home and have to change at an interim station. This is where I live. I like it.

Where I live nothing much happens, but most of the people who live here don’t want anything much to happen. We like things this way. We’re commuters. That’s why we live at the end of the line. The line is what makes us live here. We get up, take the line in. We work, we take the line back. We muscle our way through the masculine grimness of the station exit, headphones on, avoiding eye contact. We eat, we pass two hours in idle pursuits of TV, internet or household chores, and then we go to sleep. The next day we repeat. We don’t need a life here. Life is elsewhere. We go to life, via the line.

So at the end of the line is nothing much more than houses and shops, because people sleep here, and sometimes they need to buy food. We have one of every supermarket, from the ones that have quality lines impeccably sourced to the ones where you pick your cheap milk off pallets. The rest is houses and flats, which are either called studios or apartments. There is nothing else here. We don’t have a cinema, while the library and the art gallery have gone part time, a staging post to closure. No demand, see. Who would look at them? During the day, we, the people of the end of the line, are not here.

Occasionally another unoccupied patch of ground gets built on, and up go another block of apartments. We do not see much grass around here. Soon all of the end of the line will be residential, apart of course from the one of each supermarket. Some people round here worry about this, but I don’t. I celebrate it. This is, surely, the epitome of what living life at the end of the line is about. We should venerate the mundane, and the domestic, and above all, rejoice at all additions to the housing stock, which help maintain the relative cheapness of accommodation in this suburb in this most expensive of cities, for that is why we are here. We live at the end of the line because it uniquely combines relative cheapness with reasonable convenience. It’s a winning combination. If we want grass and open spaces, we have the vast, lush expanses of the city centre’s considerable parks, a medium length train ride away. And anyway, those of us in the older houses tend to have narrow, secluded gardens in which we can pass our Sundays, and on in which on rare, warm evenings we sit contentedly, drinking white or rose wine.

I live near to the station, in a house which is now old and crumbling, but which a hundred and twenty years ago when it was built must have seemed a model home for a superior, upward-moving section of the working class. The house is small and, like many houses in these parts, plagued by mice, but we have grown used to these. They are part of the picture, and I consider they have earned their place. The main thing about the house is its proximity to the station, less than ten minutes’ walk, even in the morning when I tend to be hungover, weary and slow. There’s a slight slope up to the station, as much as passes for a hill in this town with appropriately bland geography, but that just makes it that little bit quicker to get home in the evening.

It’s also less than five minutes from the nearest supermarket, which is open long hours and serves as our corner shop, for newspapers, bread and instant meals. This is a secondary and still important consideration, although it is hard to live at the end of the line and be further than ten minutes away from a supermarket. But the grade of the nearest supermarket says much about the place in which you live. Do you live near the pallet shop, frequented by mad people who smell of cheap booze and urine? Or is your house by the organic specialist, which has banned plastic bags, and from which people emerge smugly with their food in hessian holders proudly proclaiming their naturalness? We do alright. We live near the third smartest supermarket of the town at the end of the line, where you get more deluxe foods than economy. It’s a fine balance. You can read the quality of the supermarkets in the precise gradations of house prices. It costs more to live a short walk from the good ones. This has far more bearing than the quality of schools. Many of us at the end of the line do not have children. Those who do tend not to send them to school around here. So the children also commute. I find this fitting. It prepares them for their lives.

Occasionally the more middle class people who live in pockets at the end of the line have started to concern themselves with this question of community. They fret about the loss of public spaces. They grow perturbed about the lack of a night-time economy, troubled by the absence of things that bring ‘the community’ together. I tell them they are wrong. We are not a community. If anything, we might be a community of interest, but we are a community of self-interest, which seems to me a contradiction. We chose not to belong to a community when we came to live here. We are the people of the end of the line, but our end-of-the-lineness cannot join us. So these well-meaning but confused attempts at promoting the community inevitably fail, and I welcome those failures.

All in all, I would say that I am happy with my life at the end of the line. And as soon as I can afford it, of course I am going to leave.

Ants

After plagues of mice and spiders, now the house is awash with ants. In the garden on a sunny day I watched an ant stick to the shade offered by my shadow, describing my body's outline on its ceaseless journey.

Heap

He knew he was behaving like a cunt, but there didn't seem to be much he could do about it. They had been together eleven years. Eleven and a half, she would pedantically correct. And this had started over - what? Running out of milk. A row over whose turn it was to do the shopping, leading to a deadlock which had now lasted four days, with him starting to get accustomed to the taste of black coffee. Him accused of shirking his fair share of duties. Being put in the role of a typical man.

Nothing could infuriate him more. Few principles had survived the process of ageing, but one was a refusal to be held a representative for the male sex or gender. He would never be a typical man. He didn't even like cars. He'd always preferred the company of women. Never been a blokey man.

So somewhere a dam burst. Eleven and a half years of accumulated resentment swept through and the current took him somewhere he didn’t expect. She was fat. She didn't look after herself. Other women of her age looked better. Could he be blamed for looking then? And he'd only ever looked, and only recently, which made him pretty saintly. Never strayed. But the momentum carried him too far. He'd never loved her. The length of their relationship was not an achievement, not a sign of commitment, but a failure. It was down to laziness and timidity and inertia. And he'd always preferred her sister.

That was an end to it. There was just that moment where you go over the edge and you sense the vanished possibility of not falling, and then you fall. She didn't say a word, just walked out. He poured himself a drink, or rather the first in the series of drinks. With something like fresh dedication for an achievable task, he turned himself to working through the dregs of bottles of bad foreign booze brought home from disappointing holidays. He was methodical. Early on, while he was still into the ouzo, the door slammed. He had finished the grappa, the overproof rum and the raki before unconsciousness took him.

He woke up the next day face down on the sofa with fur on his teeth and in his head, ink at the back of his throat and diluted blood working its way only weakly around his body. But there was a job to be done, and he was capable of being practical. He found the biggest case with wheels and filled it with as much of his stuff as he could. Mostly clothes, toiletries, a few books, and a hand-picked tranche of CDs. The rest would have to be negotiated.

Then he considered his options. Fairly friendless, he was, when you thought about it. At least, he didn't know anyone well enough to turn up at their door and ask to be leant a spare room. But sticking around could not be an option. If he could only avoid his family, and their judgements and their pity, for a while. So the cheapest possible hotel for the shortest possible amount of time it would have to be.

It was the evening when she returned, after a day sitting in parks trying not to cry too obviously. She had worried that he might be there. It would be like him to try to patch things up, to try to take back things which would always remain said. So when she found the house dark and empty she was relieved. She reflexively put back in the drawer an odd sock he had missed in his hurry. She ate pizza and then slept on the sofa.

It was three further days before she decided to make the bonfire. This was three days of not answering the phone, keeping the mobile turned off, not checking email. After she got tired of the ringing she found a way of muting the sound. He'd be surprised by that, had always called her a technological dunce. There would be many new skills she'd have to learn, she realised.

It took her a long time to gather the stuff. He had lots of it. Never threw anything away. But she was happy to take her time. She made it an interesting task. She layered it. She put photos of the two of them at the base. Then some of his crappy books, about which she'd always enjoyed sneering. Read good stuff or don't bother. The CDs were more problematic. She knew they wouldn't burn. But the covers would, so she smashed up all the boxes, put the paper covers on the fire pile and then with a pair of scissors scratched systematically the surface of every one of the stupid shining things. This was hard work. This took her a bit more than a day. Then she cut up all his remaining clothes and added them in strips. It was quite a pile, gathered at the end of their long but narrow, unkempt garden. The neighbours would have been wondering about this, but of course she didn't know them.

But then the fucking thing wouldn't light. It was the wrong time of year for bonfires, February, and a miserable, drizzly one at that. The pile got damp overnight. She tried lighter fuel but still it didn't take off. It only smouldered a little. He'd have loved that, of course. He would have crowed about her uselessness with the practical.

So she left it. Left it as it was. It would, in time, rot, she supposed. At this time of year, it would not take long for the objects to be irretrievable. In the meantime, all she had to do was keep the phone turned to silent, keep the lights switched off and not answer the door. He would, she knew, be furious when he found out what she had done to his stuff.

About three months later it had become a warm and sunny May. The spring was promising. The housing market was strong too, and the estate agent predicted a quick sale. The owner of the property, a man in his late 30s, was keen to sell, wanting the money fast, for he was planning a move abroad. So, no chain. It was an ideal starter home for a young professional couple, perhaps newly married and looking to move out of rented accommodation and place a first foot on the property ladder. It wasn't huge, but one of the rooms could serve as a nursery, if the new owners were looking to start a family, and there was a long, secluded garden with a great deal of potential for the kids to run around in.

Only problem was that big pile of mouldy rubbish down the end of the garden. The estate agent knew it was putting people off. They'd be shown around and be convinced, could be seen to be thinking about how they'd fix the place up, how they could have a life there. Then they'd see that pile and see all the faults of the house, how it looked unloved and uncared for, how poky and dark the rooms really were. He was convinced it had lost him sales. He was going to have to have a chat with the client, see if he could get him to spend a few quid to get all the rubbish cleared. He was sure he could be persuaded.

Belfast

Belfast was something different, a true city of parts. Sure, all cities have layers, but it is rare to come across a place that can be read in so many ways. In its grand Victorian architecture, the oppressively statement-making town hall and the solid quayside buildings, it reminded me of Glasgow or Liverpool. To some extent, you might say Belfast was twinned with Liverpool, while it echoes Glasgow as an unusually proletarian city, albeit on a smaller scale. But in the city centre there were gaps, quiet spaces, dead zones, right in the heart of the city. With these odd lacunae and interruptions, it reminded me more of an African capital. Where did the life get lived when people avoided the centre? But then the pubs at the north end of the city centre recalled my hometown, a small, valleyed, industrial revolution remnant in Lancashire. They felt equally parochial. The people, too, seemed of the same make-up as my people: short and weathered, unbalanced faces with small, compressed features, bad complexions. I fitted in, and recognised neighbours wherever I looked.

The next morning we took one step west of the main drag and were confronted with the occasional preserved mural, memorials to loyalist dead, some with shockingly recent dates, a Rangers’ supporters’ club, a drum and flute band suppliers, and a shop selling red hand flags, this latter veering towards the kitsch. The murals were interesting. That they have become tourism must be something to celebrate, surely? So why does it feel uncomfortable? In the end everything becomes tourism. See also Robben Island and Soweto township tours in South Africa. And think, too, how something intended to be intimidating, to delineate territory and offer a gauntlet, could also be something creative, could be something on which love and devotion would be expended. These murals were, in some way, public art: the first British street art, perhaps, and certainly a unique, home-grown form. One of the murals was dedicated to George Best, making me pause to think further about how something which started out as political, as propaganda, can mutate, keeping the form but changing the message.

And then another short step and we were down by the university, and the botanical gardens, beautiful on this unexpectedly warm and sunny afternoon. The university was perfect, an ideal campus, the sort of place you wish you’d gone to. I could have learned here. Here was the young life of Belfast.

I found it a place of contrasts, then, of contradictions, and parts that didn’t quite mesh. But I also found myself surprisingly in love with it, and I know I’ll come back.

Aunt Janice, Uncle Pete

No one knew for sure why Janice did it. When she was in the hospital, that was one of the reasons why they wanted her to wake up. So at least then they’d be able to ask, and then they’d know.

All anyone knew is that one minute she was sat with her husband, watching TV. Then she slipped upstairs. It took Pete a while to realise she hadn’t come back. He went up, which was when he found her.

Some said she was going through the change, the change of life, and this normally so bubbly woman had been struggling. Perhaps that was true. Everyone needed an explanation. It was so out of the blue, such an unexpected thing, that it was the only natural response, to try to find a reason for it. It needed to be fitted into something, needed to be made explicable.

There was a spell in hospital, on life support. In the first couple of days there was some hope. Those are the crucial ones, the cliché has it. But gradually the prognosis grew more gloomy. Too much damage had been done to the brain by the time he’d found her there, hanging at the top of the stairs. After a few more days Pete had to make the decision to turn off the machines that were keeping her lungs moving, her blood flowing. I strain my imagination to put myself in that position.

The funeral was a predictably grim affair. That may sound obvious, but consider, some funerals are more bearable than others. Someone who has lived a full and productive life that can be felt to have run its natural course is quite an easy person to send off. Similarly someone released by death from a long illness. For a life abruptly and avoidably terminated, what do you do? There can be none of the easy homilies of the wake, none of the mutual relief that comes from trading anecdotes of happy moments. Sure, I was there, and we tried, but conversations fell flat.

I went to the funeral to help my dad, drugged with grief at the loss of a sister. I did my best to prop him up, but confess I felt nothing as strongly as the guilty relief that came afterwards, when released onto the station platform for the eventual London train.

We adopted her widower, my uncle Pete, for a while after that. He moved out of their house and lived for a spell with one of their daughters. Understandably he couldn’t stand to go back there. Nor could he force himself to go to their local, a backstreet pub in which I used to occasionally bump into them on my intermittent visits to the area. Too many memories there. So he started going to one of my dad’s regular pubs, and my usual haunt on trips north. We did our best to look after him, talk to him, include him in wider conversations, make him feel part of us. This was not easy. He was never the most easily conversational of men, and of course there was always left lurking in our pub chats the great thing that linked us left unsaid. But we tried. We might have felt good about ourselves for this trying.

We even went to the civil partnership celebration of their daughter and her longtime girlfriend, an odd but heart-warming evening from which we emerged being glad that we had attended. We probably would not have gone if it had not been for her mother’s death.

We’d see Pete quite a bit from time to time. Then one night he was in our pub with a new woman. This would have been about a year afterwards.

We made polite but even more strained than usual conversation. I found it hard to look at him. He had given up the role we expected him to play out. I haven’t seen him since.

In Ireland

Ireland is Western Europe’s East Europe.

This observation occurred to me, 28 May, in Cork, though I fear it may not turn out to be original.

Train journey

We caught the slow, crowded train through Wales, towards the eventual ferry. We have become reluctant flyers these days. The world may fry, and there seems to be little anyone can do about it, but we want the satisfaction of not being to blame. Plus the only form of journey which isn’t innately interesting, the only one where your holiday doesn’t start until you get there, is that taken by plane. But they don’t make it easy for you. Public transport still feels like a punishment, the choice of the poor and eccentric. Trains were late, full and smelly. Toilets didn’t work, food was unobtainable and information was wartime-rationed. Travelling Virgin Trains, with that lingering chemical pong, frequent slow downs, continual passive-aggressive apologies for things that have gone wrong and occasional, unexplained blasts of random noise from the speakers, is perhaps the nearest one gets in this country to legalised torture. It has the arbitrariness of Beckett and Pinter. Possibly it is really a piece of site-specific theatre, and one day we’ll all be let in on the joke and allowed to buy a copy of the script.

At one of the interminable stops a group of obviously related, clearly wealthy Jewish women got on. There were five of them and four seats around a table, and they made an elaborate ritual of trying to fit themselves in to the satisfaction of all. They tried every possible permutation, each one in turn volunteering themselves to sit in a different, distant seat. Their numerous bags also had to be passed from hand to hand continually. I watched them, against the backdrop of the bleak coast past which we trundled, with rising amusement. I realised then that the old woman opposite was doing precisely the same. We shared wry, mutually complicit smiles. It was a sweet and rare moment.

Later on the ferry, we drank overpriced, mediocre chardonnay, and appeared to be the soberest persons aboard. It occurred to me then that I would make a poor eco-warrior.

Goths

Yesterday afternoon I took advantage of an unexpected break in the weather, and was out and about around central London. It is apparently the eighties at the moment. Groups of young girls have the hair, the clothes. The cuts and colours are 1985. All are apparently worn without irony. This seems uniform.

Except for the small and rather forlorn groups of goths, still holding out against their peers. I’ve started, to my surprise, to sympathise with them. They seem a tight, internally-directed bunch, turning their backs on the world and finding sufficiency in each other. The world’s moved on, but whenever was that a concern of theirs? To be desperately, perversely, deliberately unfashionable has its own cool.

It’s just I can never quite see what’s in it for the girls. The boys, I get. Most of them aren’t good-looking, so a style that makes them look bad offers camouflage. When I see obviously attractive girls all gothed-up and looking like shit, I struggle to work out what’s behind it, what might be their motivation.

I just want them, and everybody, to be alright.

Photograph

I think often of that photograph, of the two of them, taken during some Eastern European city minibreak. The photo’s in a frame on a middle shelf in their ever-changing living room. They would have caught a budget airline, got a good deal online for accommodation somewhere reasonably central. They stand in a recently restored medieval town square, Communism’s grime freshly sluiced. It’s a sunny day. They wear t-shirts. Sunglasses are pushed onto the tops of their heads.

She looks directly into the camera’s lens and smiles, showing newly polished teeth. He looks to one side, somewhere over to the photographer’s head and to one side, into the middle distance. Like he’s looking for something else, I always think. Like he knows this isn’t quite it.

Doubtless this is just an example of the camera capturing a fleeting moment that doesn’t really represent the whole. I’m reading too much into an inexpertly-taken photograph shot by a reluctant passer-by. He was just getting ready for the photo. A second later and they’d have been both perfectly posed. It’s only one moment in a series of variegated moments. But then why put it somewhere where you can’t help seeing it, can’t help thinking about it, every time you walk into the room?

Erections

It gets to the point where he starts to experience a fierce erection when talking to her. This surprises him. It’s been a long time since just conversation with an attractive woman has been able to do this. But the magic works once, then a second time, then time and again. They talk, he gets hard. It becomes rarer that it doesn’t happen.

There seems little he can do about the fact of the erection, apart from try to conceal it with loose clothing. Or should he not? Should he just leave it there to be seen, if that happens to be the way she looks? Would that help force the issue? At the end of the conversation he will rise, walk awkwardly away. Surely she sees this?

This is, he knows, pathetic. This will never go anywhere. This is not his life. And he’s pretty sure he is not having any corresponding effect on her. But these erections, he cherishes them, for at least they make him feel alive.

Corporate flight

That morning flight back from Zürich was a glimpse into the macho, bullshit, business life I suppose I could have had. Corporate men compared cocks. I was the only thing that came without a pinstripe. The only person happy not to be alpha. To be seen reading a novel was to look a loser. The plane flew on testosterone. When it landed, it was necessary to move fast, to demonstrate your own importance. It was seven a.m., but no one dared look tired.

So that was perhaps the life I could have had, except I might hate myself all of the time instead of only most.

In the seat to my right a man was busy with a ball point pen, underlining what he must have seen as key sections of a mystifying business' annual report. He underscored almost every word.

Returning home

I returned home to fresh but uninspired graffiti under the railway bridge. To a shirtless black guy sitting on the drug-dealers' bench, unmoved the second time I went past half an hour later. To supermarket queues of every skin tone, united in surly aggression. To avoiding that group of lads spitting.

I returned home to a house that doesn't quite feel the right shape any more, and to a life which doesn't fit as snugly as it once did.

I returned home knowing that what happened never happened.

Nine steps

On the train back to London, a man was reading a document called 'Nine Steps to Effective Affirmation'. He appeared to be taking it seriously. He was making notes.

Cat

At a table, in a cafe, in Rome, a young man sits, holding in his lap a beautiful Siamese cat. He orders a large bowl of salad, and then when it comes, when he thinks no one is watching, feeds bits of it to the cat. I order a second glass of wine, but then the young man notices I am watching him.

Actress

As is custom, we left as soon as the standard applause met the end of the average play. We wanted to avoid hearing people telling each other what a good play it was. So we hurried to the pub opposite the theatre, to secure drinks ahead of the rush. We spotted spare seats in the corner, but as we lunged towards these were waved away by a man who indicated he had somehow reserved these for a party whose arrival was imminent. Surprise beating irritation, we squeezed ourselves into the margins.

The man was late thirties, early forties, tall but portly, with slightly overlong but tight, brown, wavy hair. He wore a blue top that was too close-fitting, a black blazer and khaki - I can only call them - slacks. As we sat and gulped beer like oxygen, he did something remarkable. There was a mirror behind us, and with a complete lack of self-consciousness he stood up and above our heads produced a comb, and to his evident eventual satisfaction, arranged his hair. We might as well have not been there. We were perhaps two feet away, but negligible, invisible.

Shortly after he was met by one of the actresses who'd been appearing in the average play in the theatre opposite. She was a girl more customarily seen with her hands covering her breasts on the cover of those magazines bought by shameless men, many of whom even have partners. Presumably she had sussed the looming end of short-term fame and the imminent beginnings of obsolescence - she'd be in her mid 20s by now - and was making a late bid for respectability. He talked to her about her performance in the play, some of which he had presumably seen.

"You were great. Awesome."

"Yeah? You think..."

"Yeah, and more importantly, so did the Italians. The Italians were there. The Italians I brought over? And they loved it."

"Yeah? Good, because..."

"Of course they didn't understand it. Didn't understand all of it. Bits of it. But they got the gist. The great thing is they heard you getting laughs, and that's, you know, because they won't have seen you in that kind of role before."

"Yeah, I did get laughs, didn't I?"

"Big laughs. Good laughs. Better laughs than the others. I tell you what, I think that's convinced them. I think we're good there. And where I am, I'm got three projects on the go at the moment, scripts, there’s a lot of interest, but I'm putting the other two on hold. Not going to look at them again for a bit."

"And do this one?"

"Yeah, listen, but it would be great if we could all meet them tomorrow."

"Right..."

"I'm sure they'd love to meet you."

"Okay, sure..."

"Have dinner. I’ll call. But you know, I've got something else coming up maybe that I know you'd be perfect for."

"Okay?"

"Yeah, it’s something new. There’s a script being worked on at the moment. A holocaust film. Nazis, death camps, you know the sort of thing. Serious stuff.”

“Okay, right, so…”

“And you’d be perfect for it. You could do tragic. And it’d be great for you.”

“Not comedy?”

“No, what you do is, you do this. Tragic. Then you do comedy. That order. Shows you’ve got range.”

“Right…”

“And this one could be a big deal. A very big deal. If it goes the way it should. We’re talking. Oscars.”

“Oscars…”

“Yeah, and the money’s not going to be a problem. We’ve already got the money lined up.”

“Yeah?”

“Jewish money. Very interested. This is going to be big.”

We’d normally have stayed for another pint, but as though on a secret signal both of us raised and drained glasses at that point, and then made for the exit, not catching eyes. It was either that or have another and get to the stage where I was going to punch him, I suppose.

Pretty much everything on these pages is mostly made up. But this one really happened.

Chalk

Saturday night, in an East London pub, a white enclave in a black area, self-conscious enough to have a bar billiards table. Two men with an abundance of hair play a game which they are pretending not to take seriously. One messes up his shot and curses. He marches with great purpose to the red pool table in another corner of the pub, and there, precisely, deliberately and with great thoroughness, chalks his cue. Satisfied, he strides back, flicks his hair from his eyes and resumes his game.

He still loses.

Spandex

At fifteen, I was an anorak-wearing indie kid. At that time there were many bands in which pale young men with cheap guitars would perform jangly, badly produced songs about love, usually failed and chaste love. I fell for these utterly, and even today the odd tune from that era will leave me floored and sobbing. I was as near then to being part of a scene as I ever came. In those days before the internet, the whole thing ran off fanzines, which would distribute music in flexi-disc format – ask your parents – and rave disproportionately about the latest bunch of sixteen-year-olds banging saucepans together somewhere in a broom cupboard in Bristol. To my isolated, small northern town they would come via SAE. I would avidly read these fanzines, and correspond with bands and editors, although I hadn’t yet conquered my innate shyness sufficient to summon courage to contribute to any of them, or start my own band of teenaged, bowl-haircutted fuzz merchants. Ah, regret.

The scene had a few names. To some it was twee-pop, while retrospectively the historically inaccurate label of C86 seems to have stuck, but to me it was always anorak pop. The anorak, a sexless, trainspotterish garment, was an (ill) fitting emblem of this least sexy, most introverted of pop movements. In photographs of the time I am never without my prized blue and green anorak. I look at them now and see this dark eyed, kinda cute, if I may say so, but horribly confused and uncertain stranger. I wish I could get hold of that boy now and tell him it was all going to work out eventually, and by the way, Julie in 5F really did fancy him so he should just go for it.

But I already knew then that clothes must be important, that they could mark you out as belonging to something, or as rejecting something else. It was also in my teens that I acquired, without prior consultation, something to rebel against: a step family. Assimilation was uncomfortable. I was very unforgiving of difference.

Chief among the differences was music. My steps were in thrall to the very thing which was my sworn enemy: heavy metal. It’s hard to get this across in these post-ironic, relativist times when all things are equal and every Hoxton wardrobe contains at least one tongue in cheek AC/DC t-shirt, but how I felt about heavy metal was political. It was the opposite of anything I liked, a handy negative definition. And dear god, to my dying day I refuse to yield on this point: the heavy metal of the video age was almost all awful. The steps liked bands with umlauts in odd and ungrammatical places. I studied German, and I knew they were wrong. This was big hair rock. It was bare chest rock. It was, in a time when we actually used to worry about these things, sexist, the videos objectifying scantily attired women, and yes, post hip hop, I do realise how old-fashioned this sounds, but we used to wear badges against these kind of things, albeit partly in the hope of attracting girls.

It was, in short, cock rock. I hated it. The steps played it.

And if my uniform was the anorak, they had theirs: spandex. Much of their conversation seemed to revolve around the obtaining and wearing of spandex trousers. This were highly valued items. This was their badge. I, cloistered and head in clouds kid that I was, D H Lawrence in one hand, Razorcuts seven inch in the other, had never even heard of spandex. I didn’t bloody know what this stuff was, and I wasn’t going to ask them.

Gradually I learned. They got their trousers through specialist mail order – adverts in Kerrang magazine – or certain shops in Manchester. A particularly revered pair, yellow and black, had come all the way from California. Years later I would see something similar, but baggier, being worn by the person whose job it was to warm the food in a chain pub kitchen. One of the steps was even in a band, and this got as far as gigging at venues across Lancashire and Yorkshire, at which the Californian pair would be worn, with pride. A demo tape was recorded and circulated. All this was, of course to my chagrin and envy, because even though I hated their music, I had never got that far.

I’d encounter the spandex trousers around the house more often than I’d like, and every sighting was an interruption, would remind me of my own exclusion. They underlined what I was not. It felt like an invasion. I’d see them drying against radiators in their lurid colours, alongside my customary dark brown or dark green corduroys, which I would hasten to move further away, as though there was something contagious. Perhaps the steps would be off to some gig that night, to whoop and sing along to Def Leppard, Aerosmith or Poison in some concrete arena in Sheffield. I would be certain the next day not to ask them how it had been.

I was glad when I moved away to university, where an enduring fascination with alcohol revealed itself to me, and I grew progressively less precious. But I was still the only one in my student house who didn’t go and see Hawkwind. Over the years I’ve shed the more stifling aspects of my musical snobbery, and can now confess to at least a grudging fondness for, say, Motorhead. Even with the umlaut. Although they were always at the more proletarian end of things, a speed rather than a cocaine sort of band. Poodle rock, and the occasional dubious attempts to revive it – oh how we all laughed at the Darkness for all of five minutes – continue to leave me cold. Yet when drunk at a wedding, I’m not averse to a blast of Europe’s The Final Countdown, surely the apotheosis of the form. And the singer out of Quiet Riot, Kevin DuBrow, died not so long ago and I read his obituary and ended up rather liking him, so there’s hope.

Meanwhile, spandex, at least as an item of beyond gym outerwear, seems to have died out. I have this fear even now though that it may be due an ironic revival, and Truman Brewery shops will soon be awash with imagined retro items at significant expense. The word kitsch may well be used in this connection.

And the steps have moved on, and I sort of get on with them now. Some of them have kids, some of them like the odd good record, and you don’t see any of them in spandex any more. But then, I threw the anorak away too, in a public toilet in Leeds, shortly after I got my first serious girlfriend.