Love on the NHS (37 page)

He felt restless in his home life as much as at college. Luke had never felt comfortable in his apartment block after his first week. Initially in that honeymoon period he was simply overjoyed to have somewhere to live on his own. Independence was a chance for him to grow into a fully formed man; but as soon as he realized what kind of people he was sharing the building with reality set in. His downstairs neighbour Pete would almost daily smoke potent skunk, the aroma of which drifted up through the floorboards and all around Luke's apartment. It knocked him sick and induced in him unbearable feelings of oppression.

In the apartment opposite, Luke had three different sets of neighbours in his tenancy. First, there had been an old lady who had been going deaf and forgetful in her declining health, but had a heart of gold. After a couple of years she moved to a downstairs apartment across town. Then Brandon and his partner Rebecca moved in. They had arguments on the weekends, coming home late and banging doors. Brandon was very charming and friendly with Luke and so Luke thought he may finally have found a friend.

Then his new neighbour's relationship with Rebecca soured  and he was being kicked out by her. He appealed to Luke, saying he needed a place to keep his large flat screen TV. Luke was sympathetic and so said he was fine with Brandon keeping his television in Luke's bedroom; but when Brandon and a friend carried it in, they railroaded Luke into storing a few cardboard boxes full of framed photographs, letters and crockery too. Brandon assured they would only be in Luke's for a week or two but the truth was they stayed for four months until Brandon was securely rehoused in an apartment a mile away. Luke saw Brandon a few months afterwards walking hand in hand with Rebecca - so they must have made up again. Brandon had never had trouble with women; he had told Luke he met Rebecca only a few nights after splitting up with his previous girlfriend.

Some months after Brandon's move out and the removal of his stored furniture at Luke's, in a moment of drunken abandon Luke text messaged him to ask if he knew why Luke never was romantically successful and always heartbroken. Shortly, Brandon replied and followed through on his initial warmth by inviting Luke to a party he was having; he explained there would be a girl there who was single and wanting a date and that she would meet him with Brandon and Rebecca.

When Luke arrived at the arranged venue for the double date, his local supermarket, there was no sign of Brandon; and he text messaged him but got no reply. Luke waited for another half hour after the allotted time but there was still no sign of Brandon so he walked the mile and a half home. Three hours later he got a text off Brandon asking, "Aint u comin?" He felt no choice but to ignore it. To have been made a fool of was terrible but he did not trust Brandon anymore and so determined it best to keep out of his way. Luke received a few more text messages in the next few weeks, asking him if he could lend his travel pass and even sociable "how are you" messages but Luke was unconvinced to his erstwhile neighbour's sincerity and abstained from replying.

After the young couple, another moved in: a Turkish couple of around forty to fifty years of age; Luke saw them hardly at all. He was fine with that as the man had a preposterously bellowing stomach and the woman grinned all the time in a way that was peculiarly humourless. In the apartment under theirs was Vince. Vince had visitors at strange times of the night arriving by bicycle and in expensive sports cars. They would come to sell him cannabis and smoke with him and though Luke never knew how Pete got hold of his skunk was likely to through someone Vince knew. A lot of people would make occasional visits to Vince. They were always bored, hedonistic sorts who made a lot of noise and who Luke dreaded seeing in the stairwell, let alone having to speak to. If they did spot him, they would say something like, "You alright, mate?" and as Luke nodded his head, they would exchange sleepy, beer-sodden looks with one another.

With the quality of his neighbours, Luke kept himself to himself. None of them were natural bedfellows to him and so he keeping his distance was natural. He felt lucky to have been able to avoid them as he had so far not been offered any cheap cigarettes, counterfeit DVDs or anything off the back of a lorry. He knew from what his dad had told him about time spent living in high-rise housing in Liverpool that getting mixed up in dirty deals was dangerous. "If you say no, you wouldn't be regarded as normal to those kind of people," Bruno had advised him. "The best thing you can do is just keep to yourself. As long as you aren't noticeable to them you should be fine."

"And if you did get involved with them," Bruno explained, "if they ever got caught and arrested by the police, they would probably suspect you had reported them; and those kind of people always know lots of folk who could carry out a job for them. Revenge by means of a beating, damaging your property while you're out or threats to your family are not unusual. While I was out, this man who I'd said no to an offer of stolen goods slashed my tires! I knew he'd done it but there was nothing I could do - he was six feet tall and knew lots of people. I just had to call the police, say I didn't know who'd done it and claim the insurance. I had to get out of there quickly - if I wouldn't I wouldn't have survived."

Luke felt fortunate he had never lived in a high-rise apartment. In those blocks the potential for gangs or particularly twisted individuals to stalk a person in the stairwells was lethal. Some would use well-built dogs like bulldogs and rottweilers to commit their violent deeds for them, making it harder to prosecute them if their dog was not identified; and also reducing their own risk of getting hurt in an altercation. Luke believed people who used animals for violent ends were some of the most unethical people of all. Even the police had no excuse for it as far as he was concerned. The use of dogs or horses to control others through physical means was cowardly and very selfish - as more often than not those animals met an early, bloody grave.

LVII

The other students at the college hated Luke for not swearing. "He thinks he's better than us," they would say behind his back. Luke actually did swear on occasion; he just believed it was only appropriate when a person was very angry, upset or surprised. Even then he would prefer if he and others did not do it - but if he was honest in such situations he did quite a few times. Casual swearing was the bane of his existence and yet it was a hard opinion to hold to dislike bad language since it had become so commonplace nowadays. There was a lot of hypocrisy as on television it rarely happened during daytime hours but once the watershed was broke and night came it was peppered into conversations liberally. People usually would not swear in front of their teachers and teachers would not swear in class; yet most people would swear when they were not near a person of authority and that even included the authority figures themselves.

Luke's opinion was that it lowered the tone of a conversation and appealed to the lowest common denominator. It was a race to the bottom people were engaging in. Surely life was supposed to be about trying to better yourself. It hardly ever added anything to a statement using a swear word anyway. On occasions during bus rides Luke heard people swear in a confrontation and noticed how it fuelled further conflict, whereas courteous language would calm things down.  It was just another thing that divided people and made people mean these days. Luke's accent divided people too - but he could not help where he came from. He had grew up in a large house on the end of a remote village in North Wales, and his father's habit of reading thousands of books and his mother's Jewish upbringing meant he was bound to turn out as that kind of typically middle-class young Englishman. Such men had become terribly unfashionable nowadays, what with the rise of the self-employed tradesman. There was so much money and upwardly mobile status in physical work and fashions and hairstyles were more casual to accommodate this new development, while old fashioned dressing up was frowned upon.

There were magazines that pitted people against each other - most typically men against women. Each gender's weeklies or monthlies focused on the most shallow and hackneyed topics. For men, it was nude women, building muscle and extreme sports. For women, it was babies, diets, embarrassing body photos and scandalous stories posted by readers. The magazines catering to both sexes portrayed the opposite gender as stupid and made them the butt of their jokes. Then, of course, most people supported a football team and if they did not support the same one they would fight about that. There were Christians, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists and too many other religions. Luke had no time for any of them. All they did was create unnecessary conflict as far as he was concerned. They each demanded an unreasonable amount of respect from non-believers in their set of beliefs, based on bibles and books that were out-of-date and full of contradictions and errors.

If there were divisions, it would at least be better to have ironic ones. Luke came up with the idea of a sub-culture called the Hitchcocks, young men who would shave the tops of their heads but not the sides so that they looked like balding men. Even buffoonery like that would split people, as one person's comedy is another's trash. Even drugs - which were supposed to make  existence more bearable - made people dislike each other. His classmate Dave had used to smoke skunk, the heavy variety of cannabis, for years and he now involuntarily jerked his body at the sight of people sometimes. His eyes would wander around anxiously, a side effect that lingered long after the drug taking ended. If only drugs were legal, Luke thought; then people like Dave would not be as they were. They could have smoked the regular, softer variety of cannabis and the revenue from the sale of the drugs could have funded prevention and rehabilitation of addicts.

Dave was the closest Luke had to a friend at college. He would often talk to Luke about cycling and running, his two main hobbies. He had grown passionate about each after giving up his cannabis and alcohol intake. Luke did not care for riding a bike; he had used to but had got his bike stolen - after locking it to a fence! He could remember calling out the police, then a forensics officer visiting his apartment. She had lifted the bike into the bath, brushed for fingerprints, then left it there with a viscous, leaking, oily mess stuck to the bath's bottom. When Luke had told her how distraught he was to have his bike, she had replied drily, "You'll have to leave it in front of a shop in future."

Though Luke appreciated that in a world of too much inequality, some people were desperate, he found it hard to understand bicycle thieves. Of all the things to steal, why bicycles? Surely people must have some kind of conscience; could they not appreciate the environment should not be compromised for the sake of quick money? It was probably too much to expect the kind of people who stole bicycles to understand about environmental damage, though - as if they relied on theft for survival, the chances were they had not been educated to a high standard. Luke held the partners and friends of the thieves in low regard too - although no one is perfect, his own family had come from poverty and they would have given him an earful and made him ashamed if he had ever stolen someone's bike. If Luke should have ever had a girlfriend who had committed such a deed, he would have demanded an explanation; and forgiven her only if she would make a proper attempt to reform herself and make amends. It was high time, Luke thought, that the hangers-on of criminals take responsibility for bringing a veneer of respectability to shameless individuals.

LVIII

Everything in Duldrum was strange, backwards. Luke was constrained by the hidebound and parochial locals. They liked everything to remain the same, they were suspicious of anything different. Luke bought a top hat from eBay and when he missed the post had to go and collect it. He walked all the way to the delivery office which was on an industrial estate a mile outside Duldrum's centre. Usually he could not be in at the time the postman would come and instead of leaving it with the Furchurch post office it was taken five miles away. Tired by the long trek to collect his parcel, Luke scrambled to open it. He held aloft his top hat, small and black, and giddily put it on. People looked agog at him but Luke tried to ignore them - it was only a fashion choice. Taking it personally was unnecessary.

He could just about handle the flak fired by strangers' looks; but then suddenly three young girls dressed in sportswear passed and one of them shouted, "He looks like an 'effing Jew." Luke felt himself shake and his eyes water. His mother was Jewish and he was half-Jewish himself. They were not Orthodox Jews and did not even follow the religion at all but they were still ethnically Jewish. As most Jewish people are, Luke was well aware of the violent history of anti-Semitism in Europe. Over hundreds of years, in various forms, Jews had suffered executions and terrifying harassment. As Luke had a large, prominent nose that could be likened to the very caricature of the Jew it terrified him to be targeted so. It made him worry someone would kill him; as surely if they were fuelled by so much hatred, that was not an all too unlikely end.

He reported the incident to the police along with another incident that happened three weeks later. In the second incident, Luke was not wearing a hat but rather a smart grey suit with a white shirt and blue tie. Walking home from a shopping trip to Tarnbank - which was a mile and a half from his home -  Luke was coming past a group of twenty-something men tying one of their clique to a lamp-post, evidently playing a prank on him. It seemed good natured and harmless enough so Luke gave a big smile; but the faces he smiled at turned grim and he quickly averted his eyes. He had just passed them when he heard one of them yell, "He must be an 'effing Jew." Luke reported the abuse to the police because he felt people should know about such vile racism. The responding officers who were big boned sat crookedly as they appeared to labour to take on board what he was telling them. One of the officers had a face that was nearly  identical to one of the villains in a recent Batman film. The likeness was uncanny. Luke was not certain they recorded the crimes as hate crimes although he requested them to as they did not clearly indicate to him whether or not the crimes would be recorded.