Jeremy Clarke

‘I’ve got some really nice MDMA. Really, really nice,’ he added in a gravelly, slightly sinister undertone. Unusual, this. It’s not often these days that Trev gives a ringing endorsement like that. Normally, he’s scathing about drugs. Not about the morality or the dangers but about the poor quality. He’s like our local consumer watchdog. Don’t get him started about the local coke, for example. It’s all rubbish, he says. Ask him does he know anybody that’s got any coke and Trev laughs at you. Offer him some and he’s dismissive. So for Trev to mention that there’s a drug doing the rounds that is ‘really nice’ is really surprising.

‘How are you getting on?’ said my landlady. ‘We can see the moor from our place, and every time I’ve looked at it lately it’s been shrouded in fog.’ ‘It has been foggy,’ I admitted. ‘Wet, too. And the pipes froze again.’ ‘Would you like to come wassailing?’ she said. ‘There’s nothing like a wassail to help you through a cold, wet February.’ So last weekend I went a-wassailing with my landlady. She’d said to bring a gun if I had one. If not, something noisy to frighten away the evil spirits. And it’ll probably be muddy, she said, so bring boots. I don’t have a gun. But I did have a pair of boots I wanted to try out.

The phone rang. (My ring tone is the crowd in the Bobby Moore stand at West Ham singing ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles’.) I was lying on a mattress on the floor. Early morning sun was streaming in through tall windows. A cat, one of those skinny, sharply intelligent-looking ones, was vigorously grooming itself near my feet. I found the phone on a nearby table, next to an unfinished glass of whisky. I took a sip of the whisky and caught the call before it went to answer phone. Trev. ‘Hey, Dude!’ he yelled, clearly in cracking form this fine morning. I hadn’t spoken to Trev on the phone or in the flesh since last year. It was marvellous to hear his voice again. ‘I’ve got a favour to ask,’ he yelled.

My boy and I were standing together outside the front door of his partner’s house while he smoked a cigarette. Since my boy’s first (and his partner’s fourth) child was born, they haven’t smoked inside the house. Fine drizzle was swirling in the orange glow of the streetlight. In comfortable silence we stood and contemplated the view of the council estate where he lives. A tradition has grown up for dumping ‘problem’ families here from across the county, so this particular slough of despond is notorious for drugs, petty vandalism and domestic violence. The most pathetic of last week’s crop of court cases reported in the local paper was that of a 19-year-old man charged with possession of 0.

I was invited to the local garage’s postponed Christmas party this year not just because I’d been a good customer. Perhaps more importantly I’d spent a good deal of time in the tiny office, leaning on the counter, chatting to Jim, the owner. It’s warm in Jim’s office if you keep the door shut, and his arthritic old lurcher, dozing fitfully in his basket, adds a homely touch. We’ve been talking books, Jim and I. Jim has read only one book in his life, he says: Michael Schumacher’s head mechanic’s biography. Recently, he’s embarked on a second, Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. He ordered it after seeing it at the top of an online bookstore’s bestseller list.

My car was at the garage for repairs so often last year that they asked me to their Christmas party. The event was snowed off and rescheduled for last Friday night. The prospect of a party scared as well as exhilarated me. I had been living exclusively among my own banal thoughts for so long I was prey to the peculiar fear that in company they might be laughably transparent. I had a strip wash in the kitchen sink using stream water heated in a saucepan on the wood-burning stove, shaved with an old Bic disposable razor I found in the bathroom cabinet, staunched the bleeding with cigarette papers I found in a kitchen drawer, and put on my least muddy jeans. It was still daylight when I emerged from the wood and headed across the open moorland to the car, which I leave beside the road.

This old tin miner’s cottage that I’m now living in is normally uninhabited in winter. The remoteness, incessant foul weather, guaranteed frozen pipes and impassable roads make the place unattractive for short-term tenants. ‘See how you get on,’ said the owner dubiously, when I offered to pay up front. ‘It might not be easy. You might hate it.’ I didn’t tell her that a little hardship, a little masochism, some exposure to the elements, is exactly what I am looking for. There is no running water at present. The pipe taking water from the stream and delivering it to the inside taps is still frozen, so I’m collecting my cooking and washing water in a feed bucket and a white china teapot. The water, when you see it in the teapot, is brown.

A kindly old charge nurse once took me aside after I’d appeared before a psychiatric hospital’s disciplinary committee accused of drunken behaviour. ‘Get yourself a good woman, old son,’ he counselled. ‘That’s what I did. Then you can take her to the pub, have a nice conversation, and learn to drink in a civilised fashion.’ Cow Girl enjoys a drink in a civilised fashion. She likes wine and knows a bit about it. When I’d told her, prior to our first meeting, that I was a pint of lager sort of a person and didn’t much like wine, she said she’d educate me. So whenever we’ve stayed at the hotel we’ve gone to the bar in the evening and I’ve had a lesson.

The registrar opened a screen and clicked and typed her way down a list of questions. I was ‘giving notice’ of our intention to be married after a statutory 15 days had passed. It was the day before Christmas Eve. ‘Has either of you been married before?’ she said. (She was tired and distracted. So many elderly people had died in this recent cold snap, she’d told me earlier, she was run off her feet.) ‘No,’ I said. ‘Your partner’s full name?’ she said, fingering her mouse. For a split second, before it came to me, my mind was a blank. The registrar eyed me speculatively as she touch-typed. ‘And her date of birth?’ Cow Girl was Pisces, I knew that much.

I weighed myself in India. There were scales in the hotel bathroom and I stepped up out of idle curiosity. I’d lost weight. In the three weeks since I’d met Cow Girl on a dating website, I’d lost three-quarters of a stone. I hadn’t even noticed. I weighed myself in India. There were scales in the hotel bathroom and I stepped up out of idle curiosity. I’d lost weight. In the three weeks since I’d met Cow Girl on a dating website, I’d lost three-quarters of a stone. I hadn’t even noticed. Later I rang her to report a conversation I’d overheard in the hotel gym. A perspiring English banker was telling the polite gym attendant how marriages were arranged in pre-industrial Japan.

Cow girl, my first encounter on the dating website, said she wanted to see me again, so the next weekend we met at the same hotel for another portion of the same. During the week she sent an email saying she couldn’t eat, and I’d assumed she was joking. But when she sprang out of her VW Golf to greet me she was visibly thinner, which was surprising, as she hadn’t had an ounce of fat on her to speak of to start with. She’d lost 5lbs, she said. Even more surprising was the admission that she’d been off her grub because she’d been in an emotional turmoil over the future of our relationship. The email about her not eating also included a link to a YouTube comedy clip taken from the TV series Green Wing.

I keep reading these heart-warming pieces in the quality press about sad and lonely people’s lives being utterly transformed by internet-dating websites. This person says her sex life has gone from zero to something resembling the stampede at a Harrods sale. That person says he thought his life was effectively over and has now found the person of his dreams, and their union is shortly to be blessed with issue. Anecdotal evidence, too, suggests that internet-dating sites have something for everyone. One of the chaps I go to football with, Pie and Mash Pete, is always talking about this friend of his with whom he goes fishing.

We met outside Tate Modern. The location was convenient for us both and held shared fond memories of aimless Sunday afternoon strolls along the South Bank. She brought along her new baby, a happy, sociable little soul, and we sat under the west wall of the old power station for over an hour and had so much to say we kept interrupting each other. We were better friends, it seemed to me, thinking about it afterwards, than when we were ‘together’. We had no plans to go inside the Tate and look at the art. But the concrete ramp leading down to the Turbine Hall entrance was only ten yards away, and entry was free, and as an afterthought we decided to pop down and take a quick look at the porcelain sunflower seeds.

I’ve two convictions for drink-driving and I might have had a third a couple of years ago when I hit a bus. Fortunately, I was injured and taken unconscious to hospital so there was no opportunity for me to blow in the bag. The rule back then was that a person had to be awake enough to give his or consent to having a sample of blood removed for analysis at the police laboratory. This rule has since been changed, I believe, and a police doctor can help himself to a syringe of blood from your inert, unconscious body. I must have been out for several hours because when I came round the copper and the police doctor were looking pretty appalled at having had to hang around for so long.

I made her acquaintance in the ladies’ lavatory towards the end of a fantastic birthday bash held in the upstairs room of a north London pub. I was incoherently drunk, and I think she was too, because I can’t remember either of us managing anything more than gestures or monosyllables. She was a committed, even violent kisser. And because she seemed keen to wrap me up and take me home straight away, we left without saying our goodbyes. Outside on the pavement a cab with its light on appeared right on cue, and 20 minutes later we were back at her apartment where she shoved me backwards on to a low divan, tore off both of our clothes and sexually assaulted me. In the morning, after stirring awake, we spoke sensibly, it seemed to me, for the first time.

Before we buried her in the cemetery, we attended a brief service in the church hall opposite. When she was alive, my mother’s cousin had enjoyed the kind of faith that is pretty much indistinguishable from cast-iron certainty. What we were lowering into a hole after the service, she’d have wanted us to think, was merely the husk. The evangelical pastor, an austere old sort with a cruel face who addressed us as ‘dear ones’ or ‘beloved’, clearly concurred with this view and trotted us quickly and unsentimentally through the service, starting with the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’. An old man with a comic’s face faced us from behind the keys of a portable electric organ.