And I said, “Thank you, Father, but I have friends who are helping.” I didn’t tell him what sort of community these friends belonged to, though. I didn’t tell him that they were all despairing sinners.
Do you remember Psalm 50? “Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me.” I went to Toppers’ House because I had called and called and called, and there was no delivery, and my days of trouble seemed to have lasted too long, and showed no signs of ending. But He did hear me, in the end, and He sent me Martin and JJ and Jess, and then He sent me Stephen and Sean and the quiz, and then He sent me Jack and the newsagent’s. In other words, He proved to me that He was listening. How could I have carried on doubting Him, with all that evidence? So I’d better glorify Him, as best I can.
Jess
So this bloke with the dog didn’t have a name. I mean, he must have had one at some stage, but he told me he didn’t use it any more, because he didn’t agree with names. He reckoned they stopped you from being whoever you wanted to be, and once he’d explained it to me, I could sort of see what he meant. Say you’re Tony, or Joanna. Well, you were Tony or Joanna yesterday, and you’ll be Tony or Joanna tomorrow. So you’re fucked, really. People will always be able to say things like, Oh, that’s so typical of Joanna. But this geezer, he could be like a hundred different people all in one day. He told me to call him whatever came into my head, so at first he was Dog, because of the dog, and then he was Nodog, because we went for a drink in a pub and he left the dog outside. So he’d had two completely different personalities in the first hour we spent together, because Dog and Nodog are sort of opposite types, aren’t they? Bloke with dog is different from bloke with no dog. Bloke with dog has a different image from bloke in pub. And you can’t say, Oh, that’s so typical of Nodog to let his dog shit in someone’s garden. It wouldn’t make sense, would it? How can Nodog have a dog that shits in someone’s garden, or any dog at all, come to that? And his point is, we can all be Dogs and Nodogs in a single day. Dad, for example, could be Notdad when he’s at work, because when he’s at work he’s not Dad. I know this is all pretty deep, but if you think about it hard, it makes sense.
And in that same day he was Flower, because he picked me a flower when we were walking through the little park down near Southwark Bridge, and then Ashtray, because he tasted like one, and Flower is the opposite of Ashtray, too. You see how it works? Human beings are millions of things in one day, and his method understands that much better than like the Western way of thinking about it. I only called him one more name after that, and it was dirty, so that one will have to be a secret. When I say it was dirty, I mean it will sound dirty to you out of context sort of thing. It’s only really dirty if you don’t respect the male body, and that in my opinion would make you dirty, not us.
So this bloke… Actually, I can see one advantage to the Western way of thinking, which is that if someone has a name, you know what to call them, don’t you? It’s only one small advantage, and there are millions of big disadvantages, including the biggest one of all, which is that names are really fascist and don’t allow us to express ourselves as human beings, and turn us into one thing. But as I’m talking about him a lot here, I think I’ll call him just one name. Nodog will do, because it’s more unusual, and you’ll know who I’m talking about, and it’s better than Dog, because you might think I’m talking about a fucking dog, which I’m not.
So Nodog took me back to his place after we’d gone for a drink. I didn’t think he’d have a place, to be honest, what with the dog and everything. He looked like the sort of bloke who might be in between places, but I obviously met him at a good time. It wasn’t a normal sort of a place, though. He lived in a shop round the back of Rotherhithe station. It wasn’t a converted shop, either—it was just a shop, although it didn’t sell anything any more. It used to be like an old-fashioned corner shop thingy, so there were shelves, and counters, and there was a big shop window, which he kept covered with a sheet. Nodog’s dog had his own bedroom at the back, which must have been a stockroom once upon a time. Shops are actually quite comfortable, if you can put up with a bit of discomfort. You can put your clothes up on the shelves, put your telly up on the counter where the cash register would have gone, put your mattress on the floor, and you’re away. And shops have toilets, and water, although they don’t have baths or showers.
When we got there, we had sex straight off, to get it out of the way. I’d only had proper full-on sex with Chas before, and that wasn’t any good, but it was all right with Nodog. A lot more things worked, if you know what I mean, because with Chas, his bits didn’t really work and my bits didn’t really work, so it was all a bit of an effort. Anyway, this time around, Nodog’s bits worked fine, and so mine did too, and it was much easier to see why anyone would want to do it again. People go on about the first time being important, but it’s the second time that really matters. Or the second person, anyway.
Look at what a fool I was the first time, all cut up and sobbing and obsessed. See, if I’d been like that a second time, I’d have known I was going to have problems. But I really didn’t care if I saw Nodog again or not, so that’s got to be progress, right? That’s much more the way things should be, if you’re going to get on in life.
After we’d finished, he turned his little black-and-white TV on, and we lay on his mattress watching whatever, and then we started to talk, and I ended up telling him about Jen, and Toppers’ House, and the others. And he wasn’t surprised, or sympathetic, or anything like that. He just nodded, and then he goes, Oh, I’m always trying to top myself. And I was like, Well, you can’t be much good at it, and he went, That’s not the idea, though, is it? And I was like, Isn’t it? And he said that the idea was to like constantly offer yourself up to the gods of Life and Death, who were pagan gods, so they were nothing to do with church. And if the god of Life wanted you, then you lived, and if the god of Death wanted you, you didn’t. So he reckoned that on New Year’s Eve I’d been chosen by the god of Life, and that’s why I never jumped. And I was like, I never jumped because people sat on my head, and he explained that the god of Life was speaking through these people, and that made perfect sense to me. Because why else would they have bothered, unless they were like being guided by invisible forces? And then he told me that people who were brain-dead, like George Bush and Tony Blair, and the people who judged Pop Idol , never offered themselves up to the gods of Life and Death at all, and therefore could never prove that they had the right to live, and we shouldn’t obey their laws or recognize their decisions (like the Pop Idol judges). So we don’t have to bomb countries if they tell us to, and if they say that Fat Michelle or whoever has won Pop Idol , we don’t have to listen to them. We can just say, No she didn’t.
And everything he said was so true that it sort of made me regret the last few weeks, because even though JJ and Maureen and Martin had been nice to me, sort of, you wouldn’t really describe them as brainy, would you? It’s not like they had any answers, in the way Nodog had answers. But the other way of looking at it is that without the others, I’d never have met Nodog, because I wouldn’t have bothered with the intervention, and there’d have been nothing to walk out of.
And I suppose that’s the god of Life talking, too, if you think about it.
When I went home, Mum and Dad wanted to speak to me. And at first I was like, Whatever, but they were really keen, and Mum made me a cup of tea, and sat me down at the kitchen table, and then she said that she wanted to apologize to me about the earrings, and that she knew who’d pinched them. So I went, Who? And she goes, Jen. And I stared at her. And she was like, Yeah, really. Jen. So I said, So how does that work? And she went off on one about how Maureen had pointed out something that was actually blindingly obvious, if you thought about it. They were Jen’s favourite earrings, and if they’d gone and nothing else had, then that couldn’t be a coincidence. And at first I couldn’t see what difference it made, because Jen still wasn’t around. But when I saw what difference it made to her, how much calmer it made her, I didn’t care why. The main thing was, she wanted to be nicer to me.