Curse One: The name: Hugo Jupiter. A conglomeration of the pompous and the ridiculous, and entirely wrong for somebody raised within the care system. So sling me a metaphor someone…
“Jupiter: a large astronomical body; core of liquid hydrogen; spins so fast it distorts its own shape; notable for its giant, red spot.”
See where we’re going with this? I’m tall and I’m volatile. The giant spot lurks beneath a plaster on my forehead. My wife says it’s probably the boiling up of inner torment but, if that’s the case, then she’s the major contributing factor. Common sense tells me it’s bad diet and Freddy’s grimy pints. I’ve had plenty of those thrown down my throat recently. But I wasn’t always so disgusting. No, I’ve worked at it.
Curse Two: My ridiculously hard life – highlights including the death of my mother and my father’s subsequent mental breakdown. Not to mention the requisitioning of my donkey yesterday morning by armed government stooges.
Now all this would be vaguely tolerable. Misfortunes are comparative and mine are mild. Look out the window and you’ll see an old lady beating off a leopard. She doesn’t complain, just gets on with being eaten. And I don’t complain. I just state the circumstances and get on with drinking myself to death. But my final millstone doesn’t have the decency to do that, despite my best efforts. No, he’s a veritable wellspring of self-pity. Whatever it is, it’s always everybody else’s fault. Always. This is Curse Three: the sinister rock caught in my orbit. His name is Elton. And may God help us all.
So, I’m sitting in my Tesco-issue army fatigues. Elton returns from the bar with two absinthes and a suspicious yellow spirit that smells of mink piss. I can’t prove Freddy wrung it from an animal but I wouldn’t put it past the miniature fiend to try. Elton pre-empts me as usuaclass="underline"
“I know it stinks. But it was cheap. Like life in general.”
You see, Elton is a Cockney, “born within the sound of the ‘Old Bowel Bells’,” or whatever it is they say, and he shares their genetic talent for segueing the most trivial of observations into a recital of life’s injustices. Whereas my miseries remain, on the whole, my own business, Elton’s are never more than a trip and tumble away from his tannoy speaker mouth.
So we’ve had the platitudes and now for the Sob Story™, polished beyond familiarity and into the realms of incest. Like a parrot repeating the same phrases decade after decade, that jaw works up and down. Can I shame him into silence? Is there anything from my own back catalogue that might put his meagre tribulations into perspective?
“You see that fly-killing thing there,” I say, pointing. “Do you see how it works? It electrocutes. Like my mother. You remember her. She died screaming from a thousand volts. My mother who burned to death in front of me.”
But the indigenous Londoner is a self-centred species and his woes will always outweigh the violent demise of a colleague’s mum. His eyes well up into concentric rings of various nasty purples, culminating in black, dilated pupils. His sinuses liquefy and his lips quiver and somewhere inside his crazed little mind the violins strike up. Excuse the accent; they’re not my strongpoint:
“I miss ’er!!” he starts up like a car alarm. “You wouldn’t fackin’ understand! You ain’t lost no-wun!”
Well, as a matter of fact I had, many times over, and I’d just said so.
“Booaaaargh!” he grizzles on repulsively. “[Sniff!] I miss her so much it’s tearin’ me apart! You don’t understand! It’s like someone’s just punched frew my ribs and grabbed me fackin’ ’art and… and… just ripped it aht! You can’t understand! No facker understands! It’s like… like being…”
“Yeh, yeh,” says I, “torn apart.”
Been there, done that, I’m thinking to myself. But the family I lost were real – not a product of my imagination. But this counts for nothing.
Elton bawls on. Had I given you the impression we were alone? We weren’t. We are now. Our companions have vanished, along with my will to live.
So, Elton’s missing things: dignity and an understanding of acceptable behaviour chief amongst them. Meanwhile, I find that by moving my barstool, just so, it makes a creaking sound that my drunken acquaintance takes as an acknowledgement. By steadying myself with a hand on the table and rocking my hips, I can pick beer nuts out of my teeth with a matchstick and still sound like I’m being completely supportive.
“She’s gone. I know that.”
“Creak,” goes my stool.
“Can you believe it?”
“Creak, creak.”
“She’ll never find me. [Sniff!] ‘Ow can she? She can’t trace me through the phonebook. She won’t know me fackin’ name! Boooarghh! [Sniff.] Booaaaargh!”
“Unless she saw you on that television show… wrist-deep in a dead swan,” I mutter under my breath, “and she doesn’t want to find you.” But the stool still goes ‘creak’ and then it goes ‘crack’. Then it goes ‘snap’ and I go ‘thud’. Elton doesn’t notice my downhill plummet - too busy having an identity crisis. He has two identities you see, each as annoying as the other, and they fight for dominance.
I know him as Elton. I fought alongside him as Elton. I scooped up his innards, and glued him back together, and the name I saw on his dog tags said ‘Elton’. But Elton doesn’t trust me because I used to be a doctor.
No, Elton is an artificial construct foisted upon him by sinister, unnamed psychiatrists. His real name is ‘Richard Mitts’, music hall entertainer extraordinaire. His place is onstage with a wooden dummy and his time is The Second World War. He doesn’t explain how he dodged national service.
Memories of this former life come to him in sudden anachronistic flashes: pre-decimal coinage, seamed stockings – obviously – and a peculiar recurring dream about fish. All this he relates to me in infinite, expanding detail with hours devoted to involuntary teleportations, sinister operating theatres and more unnamed doctors – this time demanding his kidneys. He hasn’t informed the police, he says, for fear they think him mad. Which he is. Completely.
I don’t dig any deeper – that would imply interest or an emotional connection. I pick up my pen. I draw a cuckoo clock on my A4 pad, linking it with an arrow to the words ‘Curse Three’ and the letter ‘M’. I sigh, run clawed fingers through my hair and start considering my exit strategy. And soon I’m clunking together the Meccano pieces of a devious plan: simple, elegant and featuring my trademark mixture of subterfuge and mind-destroying quantities of alcohol.
“Absinthe?!” I suggest, my eyes flashing enthusiastically. “Yes, I think so! Absinthe’s what you need! If you can’t forget your troubles, obliterate the recollection of remembering them!”
Elton gives a recalcitrant grunt and I lurch toward the bar, empty glasses chinking in my hand. Freddy clumps up in those ridiculously high platform shoes of his, trying to steady the bottle with a metal claw and it slips and smashes whilst he’s cursing in the name of some foreign prophet or other.
I don’t ask how he lost his hand. I know he went on holiday with a full set of digits and came back three months later with a hook and a steel plate in his skull. And, at four foot high, well, he’s just the right height to go scuttling around in low tunnels, planting bombs. It makes sense if you think about it. But I don’t like to think of it, really. I’ve never liked bombs.
So Freddy’s missing his hand, Elton’s missing his marbles and I’m missing a mother, a father and… and something else. But the hurt’s fresh and I’m wasted, so give me a minute… I have feelings. Doesn’t mean I have to like or use them.
We drink a lot in England nowadays. Combine alcohol with emotion and you get the worst kind of boozy sentimentality. Couple that with the invention of the telephone and you have the potential to make a major embarrassment of yourself, worldwide, and not remember until you have to pick up the pieces the next day. Believe me, I’ve reaped the whirlwind on that one. So, to my mind, it’s best to keep things under wraps. (Or to confine your drinking to the tops of mountains, in countries where no one speaks your language.)