CHAPTER EIGHT
The elephant woman and her geezer are vacating. A kid is clearing the glasses and he attempts a swipe at mine but I pull it away from him. I can hear this fake cackling from people standing in the lounge. It digs into me. The duplicity of it all. One thing I loved about Dolly was her inability to perform that way. If it wasn’t genuinely side splitting then she was stoney-faced. My jokes had to be immense and mint, straight off the press. .
Someone has stuck a song on the jukebox. The theme from ‘Mahogany’. It’s a track I love. I can’t help singing along:
Do you know where you’re going to, do you like the things that life is showing you? ….
I don’t.
… where are you going to, do you know? Do you get what you’re hoping for …
I did once.
I can’t access when or how I clicked she was the one. It wasn’t when I first set eyes on her. When she walked across the reception area on her admission. She was tall, well built, strong, but curvy. She had tight jeans on. High heels. Fake fur coat and swinging handbag.
I didn’t even give her a second look. She weren’t my type. But several months later she had somehow leaked in there and I was getting transfixed. There was no way she was gonna want me though, that went without saying. So I didn’t say anything. Until I did.
It was right after when she’d whispered in me ear at the social club. We were back on the ward by then.
‘I’ve gotta say something to you Dolly. I’ve got you in my head a bit.’
I was already backing off, getting in place for the standard reply and the usual come down. Instead I got this.
‘I feel the same way. It’s mutual.’
That floored me. It proper took the wind out of me. I was sideways on by then, out of the departure lounge. My eyes went saucer wide and my mouth dropped open while my head was turning back round to check her face for signs of obvious complete lack of capacity. She must be seriously crazy.
Her face was kosher, she was nodding slowly, and she’d taken her specs off for a second, so her eyes could talk. She never took her specs off and for a split second I could see into the deepest corners of her mind. There was not even one shade of grey. She meant what she’d said.
She put her specs back on.
Forced laughter vented from my nostrils as I clamped my eyes shut and shook my head.
‘ Are you for real? No … really?’
‘Really yeh.’ We both looked at the floor then. My mouth was making all kinds of stupid shapes.
‘Ok … I …. we’ll …..’
‘Yeh.’ We made it timely. Headed off in opposite directions. To digest the impossible. I was waking up to considering that for once in my life, a woman just might not be repulsed the minute she got near me. And there was an outside chance, huge odds, but almost alive and breathing.
I might not have to do this shit alone any more.
When I got outside for the next fag break she was already seated on the benches in the smoking area. Shaking violently. I didn’t know what to say. I was scared shitless too.
A few days later she gave me a little folded up piece of paper. When I opened it, it was there in black and white.
‘I think I’m in love with you.’
I’d been waiting a lifetime for that.
CHAPTER NINE
There had been other ones. They were supposed to be love but there was nothing on the flip side. I was in it on my own. The first one was when I’d started this new job behind the bar in this boozer in Kennington Oval. I’d just walked through the door and this bird was ringing up the price of a pint in the till. There was something Dollyish about her but I didn’t know that coz Dolly was lurking about twenty five years away in the future direction from where I stood. Milly was all smiles and laughs. Typical celtic, deep blue eyes, ginger hair, pale skin, freckles and plenty of love handles. She was from Anglesey, minus the Welsh accent. She had this babyish voice, sweet, rounded vowels. It was a tool to draw men in.
She was looking for a place so she moved into the squat where I was living. An old cold, damp and derelict five story Victorian manner on a well posh street in the Borough, full of houses owned by MPs and Harley Street bods. She brought home regulars from the pub, mostly old bill and I soon found out that six coppers in one day was her normal. This wasn’t a great discovery on my part as I happened to be on the class ‘A’s.
It wasn’t long before Milly had also taken up residence in my head. But she was focussed elsewhere. She incorporated a regular, a Liverpudlian joiner, and they had the room directly above mine, so I had to listen to the whole lot. The moans, creaks, bangs, hallelujahs. The jealousy sent me crazy and more and more tormented about my female body.
Milly and I became close friends, but I never told her how I felt. That I had fallen head over heels. After a year or so she had had enough of my use of gear, and left. Just walked out. She stayed away from me for a while and that was torture. The friendship continued for another year but she distanced herself more and more. She never contacted me, I had to call her. Then one Christmas she turned up with some presents. We chatted and everything seemed normal. So I wasn’t prepared for the letter I got in the post about a week later. It was long. Seriously long. The longest letter I have ever received in my life. Written on what must have been a six foot piece of paper. And I’m not stretching it. No. I measured it. It could easily be summarised though.
‘Fuck off’.
I couldn’t fuck off. That would have been impossible so I decided my only option was honesty. I wrote back on a reasonable sized small piece of paper.
‘Dear Milly
I’m in love with you’
Caseyxxx
My honesty wasn’t just overdue. It went way past that. It was like showing up on the job, not an hour late, a day late or even after you've been sacked, but when the firm has gone bust.
There was the final letter then. Short and sweet this time. I kept if for years to torture myself with. Safe in a shoebox with some other major stuff. It basically translated as:
Dear Casey
This doesn’t change anything. I feel like you’ve lied to me. Still fuck off.
Keep on thinking happy thoughts
Milly.
There weren’t any happy thoughts. She just probably thought there was coz I had this habit of morphing into a grinning cheshire cat when she was about.
My heart was broken. For the duration. I was kind of lucky that there were no mobiles back then. Otherwise I would’ve been blocked. Defriended on Facebook, trashed on Twitter, and outed on instagram .
I couldn’t tell anyone. Coz no one knew. It was still early 1990s. It would have been fine if Milly had been Mike, or Martin or Malcolm. But she wasn’t. So there was nowhere left to go but the plughole. If there was any social side to me, it died after that. A long slow death. And work tailed off too. I’d been lodged from my job at the Merchant House pub by that time and had taken up motorbike despatching on my Honda H100 two stroke. I just have this image in my head. Of a roundabout. Chucking the bike down, diving into the grass and sobbing my eyes out. With my lid still on and cars circling around me.
A year later, when it finally clicked that going away was what I bona fide had to do, I usurped myself in childishness. I sent Milly a parting gift. A load of used, blood-clogged syringes lodged through her letterbox.
It would have been one hell of a lot simpler if I’d just told her I was madly in love with her in the first place. I’m pretty sure she was bisexual anyhow. It weren’t as if she was likely to freak out about it.
There were other bods living with me in the squat by then. The only one I had any affinity with was Alan, an artist who used to live off rotten fruit and veg picked off the ground at Borough Market. He came in my room now an again when he wanted to scrounge from my jar of butts. He was rolo solo too. I couldn’t connect though. Not really. Not with anyone.
It was becoming more and more like I was hunkered down in a faraday cage with my own feelings. On me tod, in me room, door shut, world out.
When I left that gaff, I left people. For the duration. And they left me. It takes two not to tango. People don’t get to be alone on their own. Those bods out there aren’t all squeaky clean bystanders. They make a point of looking the other way. But they probably couldn’t have caught my eye anyway coz my face was mostly hanging somewhere near the floor, needle hanging out of my arm. There was sod all to stop me using alone, grafting alone, gouching alone and waking up clucking on my own. Every morning. Heroin was my partner and crack was my best friend. I fully believed that heroin was God coz I remember cutting myself so I could write in blood on the wall:
Heroin is God.
I had been a junkie already by then for about seven years and I had fifteen more years to go.
It took me three years to get over Milly. Every now and then I check out social media. Never found her. Milly Morgan. She’ll have been hitched several times. Odds are she’s got her own restaurant. I see kids, grandkids, even great ones. All that crap. She’ll be one hundred percent certain I’m dead and buried a thousand times over.
Share this post