My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (6 page)

Also, Topsy ate money. Not in the metaphorical sense of having to go to the vet’s and have a lot of operations or anything.

She just liked eating money.

My mum would leave cash on the kitchen work surface after those “Clothes Parties,” and once Topsy ate it. I like to think that Topsy was a vehement anticapitalist and that this money-guzzling was a statement of some kind, but I only like to think that ’cos I’m a twit.

I was seven years old when my mother got cancer for the first time; she had to have a hysterectomy, which was diffi cult

for her and cemented me forever as an only child. If you have no brothers and sisters it defines you for life; even when you’re thirty you refer to yourself as an only child.

While she was in hospital, I found myself uprooted from the security of Grays and forced to go and live with her family.

They’re good people, but I’d never felt part of the family; I watched Christmases and birthdays through patio doors in my mind. The first night at my maternal grandmother’s house in Brentwood I wet the bed. She humiliated me while we changed the sheets, saying I was “too old for that sort of business,” and that I was bad and responsible for my mother’s illness. I’ve found that difficult to forget. She was a much-loved woman, my grand-40

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mother, Dusty Miller, and meant the world to her children and my cousins. I took that exchange as further evidence that there was something wrong with me.

The hospital my mum was in (the same one where I was born, in Orsett in Essex) was all decaying and falling apart: it’s been made into flats now. Everything’s been made into flats now: schools, churches, hospitals. What are we to do when the occupants of these flats have children, get married, get ill and die? Bury them in the scarce earth only to learn their coffi ns

have been made into flats now?

The hospital became the bleak venue of a courtship between my mum and her new boyfriend Colin. I fucking hated Colin.

Before she was ill, she used to have these parties—of which I would be quite disapproving—at which loads of people would gather downstairs, making adult noises, not sexy noises, just the adult rumble, punctured with Sid James laughs and the clinking of glass. I think Colin had first crossed our threshold to attend one of these gatherings, and then visited her when she was in hospital.

My mum eventually recovered, and I went back home to live with her again. She told me that she had only survived because she loved me so much. For the first seven years of my life, the house in Grays had been a kind of extension of my mother’s womb—a comfortable environment in which I felt safe. In later life I wrote a poem about mum’s illness called “Hysterectomy Angel,” which ended with the somewhat troubling (at least in terms of conventional Freudian psychoanalysis) line: “When I fall in love, it will be with Mother.”

But now my incestuous bubble was about to be punctured by the arrival of this swarthy yet utterly humdrum man. Colin was a

good-looking

individual—somewhere between David

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Hasselhoff and George Best.* He, like my dad, had been a brilliant footballer in his youth. He was handsome but utterly lacked glamour. Not that lacking glamour is necessarily a terrible thing; Alan Bennett lacks glamour and is perhaps the greatest living Englishman.† Colin was, I suppose, part of the paradigm where dead beautiful women sometimes neglect to develop a personality, because they’ll be invited to functions regardless:

“Just pop a frock on, and I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

A personality for the incredibly beautiful can be a pointless cargo, regardless of gender. Colin moved into the house that we already inhabited, and never really recovered from the sense that he lived in a home that my mum and dad had occupied together.

Because Colin had a job (he initially worked nights in a factory, checking breeze blocks, and then later became a van driver), there was a flush of new income into the house hold. Whenever a new consumer item was bought—a sofa, or a washing machine—it would be worshipped like a Dyson Deity entering the home: as dear Morrissey said, “Each house hold appliance is like a new science in my town.” Colin would extract a tiresome price for these exciting new material idols.

He had these pointless, hateful drills, like rotating the sofa cushions at night—lest the sofa should show some sign of the

* George Best was the best British footballer of all time. A self- destructive, alcoholic genius, he came to prominence during the pop cultural revolution of the ’60s, and was frequently referred to as the “fifth Beatle” like umpteen other people at that time—there were so many fifth Beatles that, had they all been allowed on stage, they’d’ve made Earth, Wind

& Fire look like an underfunded one-man band. Four years after his death, Manchester United fans still sing anthems in his honor; think Mickey Mantle meets Jim Morrison.

† Alan Bennett is an English playwright and comic legend. He is an integral part of the British comedy landscape, as he became famous as part of the Beyond the Fringe team that included Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. He is northern, bespectacled, working class, gay, timid and demure, and his most famous character was a Church of England minister, but passages of his prose have the intensity of Byron.

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passing of time, or experience, or joy. And him sat forever in reluctant pants in the corner of the room, clutching a can of Ten-nent’s Super, or some other homeless lager, the faithful TV

remote forever resting on his naked thighs like Blofeld’s cat.

I was unable to categorize or understand the flow of Colin’s moods. All I knew was that he were perpetually displeased with something, and fundamentally disapproved of me. I was the an-tithesis of all that he stood for—this simple, working-class man, a humble individual with low expectations of life, whose only dream of becoming a successful footballer had long ago been packed away. And while in retrospect I can understand his resentment of my Quentin Crisp quirkiness—flitting around, all self-absorbed and vain and unusual—for me, he was a toxic in-terloper in my home. Colin: this essentially misanthropic man, 43

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not having enough vitality to be actively hateful, but constantly down on all life.

I had a growing sense that I was a disappointment to people: not only that I wasn’t the kind of person my dad would have wanted me to be, but also that I wasn’t able to look after my mum; either to prevent her from getting ill, or to stop Colin from moving in. All that seemed to be left to me were my own limited resources, and an intensifying thirst for animal friendships.

I really craved the company of animals—the wordless simplicity of it. Even now, with my cat Morrissey, I cherish the moments that I’m absolutely alone with him, and the unrecorded tenderness that no one will ever know of—the simplicity of

“Oh, I’m just here, with this cat.” I don’t even feed him that much any more, ’cos Lynne, the house keeper, does that now.

But he seems to want something from me that isn’t food, and perhaps that thing is love.

My relationship with Topsy quickly grew very intense. Perhaps because she was a problem dog, we had more in common than I’d initially realized. I sometimes cuddled her too hard so that she would yelp. “Here, have some of my painful love,” my febrile embrace would tell her. “It is constrictive and controlling and painful, like all love should be.” In later life, I have come to realize that any expression of love which ends in a yelp probably requires modifi cation.

When we first got Topsy, she would be allowed to sleep in the bed with me: I hope it is not necessary for me to stress the platonic nature of that relationship—not platonic in the purist sense, there was no philosophical discourse, but we certainly didn’t fuck, which is usually what people mean by platonic; which I bet would really piss Plato off, that for all his thinking and chatting his name has become an adjective for describing sexless trysts. But, 44

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when Colin came, an absurd edict was introduced whereby she was no longer allowed upstairs.

I evidently had a lot of anger and hate in me about this, because I would perch at the top of the stairs and lure her to come up—“Topsy! Topsy! Topsy!” Then, when she would slink nervously upward to the forbidden terrain of the upper fl oor, I would suddenly become Mr. Hyde. “Oh dear, Topsy,” I would declaim, in a rather arch manner, “you know perfectly well you’re not allowed upstairs” before cruelly kicking her back down to the bottom again, where I would rejoin her and give her a sympathetic cuddle, regretfully muttering, “Oh Christ! Were you kicked down the stairs? This is terrible.”

That’s quite fucked-up, isn’t it? My friend Matt Morgan says Topsy must’ve thought she lived in a house with twins—an evil one who lived on the landing, and a good one who dwelt downstairs. I feel very guilty about this conduct and try to off er amends by treating animals with respect at all times. (In fact, while writing this, a gnat, which has been biting me all evening, rested momentarily on my keyboard and, though I’m quite cross about its bloodsucking, I gently requested that it dine on me no further rather than dashing out its wicked brain onto the space bar. It ignored my attempts at a civil solution, suggesting that perhaps our leaders are right and you can’t negotiate with terrorists. Or gnats.)

With Topsy at my side, I’d head over the road to rescue the innocent creatures of the chalky wilderness from the tyranny of free will. How I rejoiced in rescuing those nestlings. “My God!

I’ve got this thing. Now I can take it to my house, I can have this innocent, terrified bird, staring up at me and exuding this strange, sweaty smell.”

I would make a new home for them in my AT-AT Walker—a Star Wars toy with legs from The Empire Strikes Back: it struck 45

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back very hard at Essex’s wildlife, with me as the Emperor’s well-intentioned idiot apprentice. All my other Star Wars fi gures lived in there too, so if you opened it up you’d see Lando Calrissian, a storm trooper and a baby sparrow—an unlikely trio, yes, the three’v’em’ve all got their foibles, sure, but they’ve got each other, and they’ll all learn something on this journey they’re taking together.

The problem with rescuing baby birds is that it’s very hard to get them to eat properly. You have to chop ’em up worms, which they don’t want to eat. Which I quite understand because they look and smell awful, writhing on a spoon like spastic spaghetti (spazghetti?); I wasn’t prepared to pop it in my gob like their real mum would’ve done. “My real mum chews my food up and regur-gitates it,” one might’ve said. “I don’t care what your real mum does, while you’re under my roof, in my AT-AT Walker, you’ll live by my rules.” Sadly, my avian nursery had a one hundred percent failure rate. If I was a rehabilitation center for fl edglings, the AT-AT Walker would have been sold off to pay for counseling for the grief- stricken parents.

For me it seemed like an opportunity to have something of my own. I really loved those little pricks. I kept having to get rid of their bodies, like Bill Oddie as a hit man, and they looked all dead. In Enid Blyton, the animals would always survive. But even now, I don’t think I’d be able to get a little baby bird to live—how does anyone do it? I suppose it takes a lot of devotion.

You’ve got to be doing it all the time, like when Terry Nutkins has those otters in his bath.* I think one of them otters scoff ed down his fi nger by way of thanks. So in a way I was just unknowingly

* Bill Oddie was a famous comedian who became latterly more known for ornithological programs. Terry Nutkins is a wildlife TV presenter, forever lodged in my mind because an otter that he rescued ate his finger. His career has been reduced to one of amphibious mammal victimhood.

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avenging Nutkin’s lost digit; you send one of ours to the hospital, we’ll send one of yours to a Star Wars merchandise morgue. In fact loads of yours.

This bit of my childhood might be a bit of a downer to read; it was a bit of a downer to live an’ all. The period around my seventh birthday has been studied by so many analysts and counselors that it’s little wonder that I was such a show-off , as if I could feel the eyes of future do- gooders peering at me through the decades. I had an insular yet somehow idyllic early childhood—which was okay, so long as I wasn’t forced to leave the house or do anything with other people—that was suddenly brought to an end by a sequence of dramatic shocks. My mum getting ill, Colin turning up, then my dad, with the best of intentions and a pocket full of transitory cash, deciding to send me to a posh, private school called Gidea Park. Academically, I would inevitably lag behind the privileged elite of Gidea Park College, so my dad arranged for me to have private tuition with the bloke next door to him, who looked a bit like the former Labor Party leader Michael Foot (it wasn’t actually him, he was a beautiful and idealistic man, they just looked similar).

Once, when I got a question right, this chap—by way of congratulation—stuck his finger up my arse and felt my balls.