Jeremy Clarke

I asserted that my room was booked and paid for by the travel company organising my trip. Maarika, the lovely Estonian trainee receptionist, said the room was booked, yes, but not paid for. I insisted, she resisted, I gave way. I handed over my credit card and signed here, here and here. She handed over the card key to room 286 and said she hoped I would sleep well. Only when I was standing in the tiny, not particularly clean room overlooking a noisy road junction did I realise that Maarika’s hope might have been sincere. It was 11 o’clock on Saturday night. Police and ambulance sirens blared more or less continuously. From every fourth car issued the boom, boom, boom of a boom box. The double glazing was old, cheap, badly fitted and useless. I was sober.

Someone comes to the front door, which is wide open to let in the sunshine, lifts the heavy brass knocker, and lets it fall, once. I’m upstairs, in a dark bedroom, bent over the laptop. I don’t hear anyone go to the door to answer it. The visitor waits patiently, then after perhaps half a minute touches the doorbell just enough to make it bubble into life. A modest ring. Not peremptory. Still no one comes. I’m feeling far too unsociable today to haul myself out of my swivel chair and put on an appropriate face for dealing with strangers at the door. For whoever it is must be a stranger. Anyone familiar with this house knows there’s no need to knock or ring, let alone do both. Someone answer the door for crying out loud, I think.

I listened to actor, presenter, and ‘activist’ Tony Robinson choose his Desert Island Discs on Sunday. He’s a doctrinaire leftist, and all my prejudices are on the opposite side, so I didn’t expect I would be cheering the man on. Nor did I. I’m an ardent listener to Desert Island Discs and I don’t think I have ever heard such flagrant moral vanity in a castaway. However, he said two things that I agreed with profoundly. One was that we owe a debt of gratitude to the generation who fought the war and that we ought to treat them better in their old age. The other was how thrilling it is to take your grandchild to the zoo, as he had recently done.

Our relationship lasted a week. This is how we met. She was standing outside the pub at kicking-out time. Could I do her a favour? Would I go back inside, into the gents, and buy her a packet of condoms from the machine. They weren’t for her. They were for her teenage son, who has recently become sexually active. In the gents, at the machine, I pulled out the wrong drawer and obtained by mistake a capsule of herbal aphrodisiac, the last thing he needed probably, and had to return armed with more pound coins. Before we parted I put my mobile number in hers. We met the next evening. She gave me a Reiki massage. She gives them for a living. She gave it at her place of work, on the floor. Before starting, she said did I have any current health concerns.

Early on Sunday morning the phone rang. Trev. He could hardly speak because his ribs hurt so much, he said. And I should see his face. One eye was closed, he had a deep gash across his forehead and a chunk had been taken out of the top of his nose. But how had it happened? One minute he was walking home alone from the disco, and the next he’d woken up in bed and found himself in this terrible state. Did I know what had happened to him? And where did I disappear to, anyway? One minute I was there, he said, next to him on the dance floor, and the next I was gone. I’d left early to catch the night sleeper to Paddington, then the Heathrow Express to Terminal 1, I said. I was sorry, I said, but I had absolutely no idea what had happened to him.

After I’d migrated from Essex to Devon during the last recession but one to look for casual work, the first woman I ‘went out’ with in any formal sense was my boy’s mother. She lived at her mother and father’s tied cottage and for a while I more or less lived there as well. Her father was a cowman, and the sweet, lovely smell of liquid cow manure permeated the house when he was there. The mother was, in her words, a ‘scrubber’ and she scrubbed for a Mrs P and a Mrs R to the point of total exhaustion. My boy’s mother was then still at school.

On the morning of the day that the Elect were scheduled to be whisked up into Heaven in what is known by Christians as the Rapture, I was standing outside a neighbour’s front door holding a piping hot baked potato in each hand. On the morning of the day that the Elect were scheduled to be whisked up into Heaven in what is known by Christians as the Rapture, I was standing outside a neighbour’s front door holding a piping hot baked potato in each hand. This neighbour is a tiny woman in her mid-nineties who ought to be in a nursing home, but she’s one of those intransigent souls who would rather die. She lives entirely on bread, butter, eggs and potatoes.

After the Cow Girl debacle, I went straight back online with another dating site. I was working on the same principle as those eager to get behind the wheel again as soon as possible after a serious accident to regain confidence. I signed on with a dating site designed for people wanting to have sex with as many people as possible and posted a photograph of myself with no clothes on, just my glasses, and smiling confidently and a little suavely at the camera, as though clothed or unclothed it was all the same to Lord Tangent, as I called myself. I also indicated, by ticking boxes beside diagrams of little stick people making love in various positions, the positions I preferred.

‘Come on, man, wake up! What are you doing lying here like this, dressed like this?’ He was a young black man, confident, street-wise, and he sounded let-down, disappointed. I think it was the suit and tie. He didn’t like to see good clothes treated like that. The tie meant I was a conservative type with a comfortable home to go to, and I had no business making an exhibition of myself like this. I sat up. His minicab was right over there, he said. He could take me home. Or, better still, there was a cheap hotel just around the corner. He could walk me to the end of the street and point it out. It wasn’t good for me to be laying there on the pavement like this, man. I could get robbed or anything.

I came up to town for a party to launch a new publishing company called Notting Hill Editions. One thing led to another afterwards, my rail ticket was open-ended, and I stayed up in town for two days and nights, drinking in pubs and clubs. Two incidents stand out in my mind from the broken kaleidoscope of experiences, one right at the very start, one near the end. In the first, an evangelical Christian flung himself down next to me in a crowded railway carriage and started boasting about his close relationship with God. In bragging loudly about God to me, he was also testifying to the entire carriage. The more people who heard him, was the line of thinking, the more chance there was of the Holy Spirit convicting someone of sin and adding to his tally.

The Spectator is a civilised paper. If they give you a weekly column, they are pleased for you to say what you like. The only editorial interference you can expect, apart from being hired, is the sack. They’d all rather die a slow and horrible death than exert the slightest influence over what you write. Each week I email this column to the infinitely forgiving Arts editor, Liz Anderson, who has cheerfully fielded my usually late copy for ten years. The only time she interferes with the content — and always with tremendous reluctance and a profusion of stricken apologies — is when the lawyer has indicated that he is ‘uncomfortable’ about something and that we should change a name or delete a libellous word. It’s happened once, maybe twice.

I rang my boy. He was in the supermarket with Oscar, my 15-month-old grandson, spending his last 50p on four ‘basics’ toilet rolls, he said. The toilet rolls cost 48p. It was a good job, he said, that he had nine cigarettes left in his packet to last him until his partner’s pay cheque from the government arrived. Ten minutes later, I received a text from him. The usual one — ‘can u ring me pls’. He’s never got any credit on his phone so he texts me and I call him right back. I called him. He and Oscar were in the back of a police car, he said. He was being cautioned and fined for having no car insurance. Could I come and give them a lift home? He was outside the school, he said. When I got there, it was as though a major incident had occurred.

After Cow Girl abruptly terminated our relationship, there was a long radio silence between us, during which time I was fairly demoralised. I’d thought I was lovable. If anyone could be bothered to look hard enough, or dig deep enough, I’d always thought, they’d find gold. But Cow Girl had struck no pay dirt, knew with an old sixty-niner’s instinct that it wasn’t worth looking any further, and she had got out with an almost indecent haste. The characters in Sex and the City had a handy mathematical formula for calculating how long it takes to recover from a broken relationship. Work out how long the relationship lasted, they said, then halve it. I’d known Cow Girl for five weeks, and for one of those weeks I was in India.

This year I was once again sumptuously entertained at the Cheltenham Festival by the racing tipster Colonel Pinstripe in his tented chalet. On Gold Cup day I presented myself at the flouncy entrance and the Colonel, standing just inside, like the custodian of a harem, warmly welcomed me in. Before introducing me to the company, the arm came around my shoulder and he steered me discreetly to one side. ‘My girlfriend thinks she’s got a stalker,’ he said anxiously. ‘Oh, no!’ I said. ‘Well, she’s not my girlfriend yet,’ he said, waggling his eyebrows, clearing his throat and adjusting his pink Hermès tie. And that’s how it is with the Colonel. He likes to get you off on the right foot with a daft joke. It sets the right tone.

Beside the roundabout a woman was standing with her thumb out. Late thirties. Black knee-length boots. Old jeans. No coat. The thumb was resigned, indifferent. I swung in sharply, positioning the door handle precisely level with the thumb. She pulled the door open and sat in. A red, careworn face. I stated my destination. She said she would ride with me as far as Graves Cross. I clicked the lever into drive and we set off up the hill. Silence. She stared resignedly ahead. If hitch-hikers prefer not to speak, it’s fine. I’m not one of those who feel they are owed an explanation or a potted biography. I usually have the music turned up in any case. But this woman’s indifferent, fatalistic air impressed me.

I woke in room 272 of the West Ham United Quality Hotel faced with the usual questions. What peculiar instinct had brought me safely back when I couldn’t even remember checking in? Were my phone, wallet and car keys still with me? Had I made an exhibition of myself? Committed a crime? I leapt out of the bed and checked my pockets. My clothes were draped over the chair in an amazingly orderly manner. My wallet and phone were there — thank God — but no keys. I tried to retrace my footsteps in my mind. It was a complete blank. Of the match I could remember nothing. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this alcoholic blackout was the worst yet, covering an entire afternoon and evening. Not the slightest impression remained of any of it.