Trivial Tales of Everyday Madness: Different Worlds – 7

Robert K Hogg

...We spent the night in a lay-by, sleeping in the car. I woke up in the daylight while
everyone was still dozing, reaching for my comics behind me first thing in the way
my mother would reach for her fagerettes when she first woke and after first
coughing her guts up which got worse as the years went by.

I would listen to her retching from our own bedroom, knowing I would never take up
smoking, it long having become associated in my mind with her bottles of pills in the
bathroom cabinet and under the coffee table in the sitting room (along with her
magazines); to me just another indication of her general malaise. A cigarette
constantly burning in an ashtray on the fridge in the kitchen, the live in bo, Ian, once
sarcastically observed that she would have two going at the same time (the voluntary
ruination of her health to his secret delight, as was their mutual fidelity to death and
destruction) when she alternated between the kitchen and bathroom as she got ready
to go out, applying her make-up in front of the mirror, the acrid smell of cigarette
smoke and cheap perfume forever combined in an unpalatable conglomeration and
combination in my memory. Or it used to be. As was the mixture of shampoo and
fags - as she and we and everyone else called them - when she would wash my hair
in the kitchen sink, smoking between curses and blowing it into the basin and the
back of my head, the smoke as she scrubbed and huffed and puffed, unmindful to my
discomfort and repressed irritation, the whole, punctuated by pushing my head
slightly into the water to emphasise her points while she strained to control the
impulse to give in to the irrational rage threatening to overpower her as she
simultaneously came up with her justifications for feeding and keeping it, and that
only outright murder might finally assuage.
Cigarettes were associated in my mind with foulness, of the air and breathe and mind;
an utter waste of money, not mine, but still unutterably ignorant and stupid. I could
never understand how other kids and a few of the kids I knew could smoke. The
negative connotation they came to have for me, the extent of the abhorrence I felt
towards them, and more so towards any pile of ash and stubs in an ashtray, amounted
to a form of phobia. Already in my teens, she once asked me to hold her cigarette for
a moment (what she actually said was “hud ma fag fer a minute”.) while she saw to
something or other, and though still intimidated by her I almost refused. but held it
anyway, at arms length to keep the odour away as if it were a stick of gelignite – this
from a kid who hadn't yet got into the habit of regularly brushing his teeth and
chronic nose picker (and expert flicker). Then again, some kids ate their own snot –
as equally incomprehensible to me as the supposed joys of ingesting acrid smoke into
ones lungs. Flicking balls of snot accurately was a practised art as was flipping long
diagonals of loose hanging ones or after dragging them out; but never in mixed
company. A private vice, along with later hysterical masturbation - to use the late
great John Peel’s choice phrase. Neither one at any point discovered by my eagle-
eyed mum.
Or so I’m assuming, perish the thort.. How I detested her licking and sucking her
nicotine-stained fingers with a loud smacking slurps. Did the woman have no finesse
at all? This from the kid who once, after a lengthy excursion into known territory
had mistimed getting back to relieve myself, and I knew by the time I was at the
bottom of the stairs I just wasn’t going to make it too the loo, and she had her airhead
'pal' Marion visiting, so there was no question of my sharing my mishap, but to my
relief, no pun intended, no-one was in the bathroom, as I slunk in legs apart like
Yosemite Sam – or Daffy Duck – as if I had developed a sudden case of rickets; the
turd, an uncharacteristically and contrarily sloppy one, cradling precariously in my
pants. I peeled both my trousers , then pants off, keeping them level so as not to let
the dreaded evacuation, slip, grimacing in disgust at the sight and pong of it, then
tipped it all into the bowel of the toilet, but my pants were still badly stained. Too
embarrassed to risk leaving the bathroom to toss them in the bins outside at the
bottom of the flats, I rinsed them gingerly under the tap, then knuckle-scrubbed them
in the sink, then dangled them from the end of my mum's sweeping brush to dry
them against the “special” heat lamp. It still took a while, and she was calling that
Marion, (predictably), “needed to get in to the toilet”. (As working class scum, we
didn't say bathroom - or I never did). Anything to stir up trouble, for all I knew; and I
didn’t, the disingenuous bitch. But I had been a while. She’d just have to wait. I put
my pants back on when they were bearably dry. “What were ye dai'n in there?” my
mum calling again in exasperation, before letting the big M know the coast was clear.
I wondered if the bathroom would smell. But them assuming I had a bad case of the
runs – diarrhoea - was more bearable than any of them sussing I had shat my pants.

I didn’t get into any bother for being sick in Uncle Billy’s car on the way to London,
short of a snort of disgust and exasperation of Granddad’s, probably more concerned
with my being a bit of a nuisance to his son.

Memories of visiting my mum in Hammersmith Hospital... Only, I didn’t know that

was what it was called; it was just another hospital to me. London didn’t mean much
to me either. All these people with places to go, people to do. Dickens, Oliver Twist,
music, all associations forgotten. I was oblivious to ‘swinging London.’ At some
point we had a meal in a large dining area. Thin slices of meat in a warmish gravy
and mashed potato. A favourite meal of mine, as was anything with mash and gravy.
No doubt we'd went to see my mother first. We were led into a room with a large
glass screen, behind which stood my mother, shielded from the dangers of the world
and us, now smiling and greeting us, like a cheerful Hannibal Lector, as if I were a
real live person and all were normal and she was too; the usual foul temper
temporarily in abeyance under the circumstances. Perhaps it might always be thus.
The thought may even have crossed my mind. The nurse came in with a meal,
passing it through a low aperture to my mother. Maybe that’s when we went for ours.
Later, out in the town with my granddad, I wheedled, whined and cajoled him for a
set of plastic golf clubs in a shop window we stopped to look at. I was probably
trying it on. My mother would’ve quelled it with a glance, but then I’d never have
asked anyway with her. I felt he was being mean and unreasonable. He may have
been. The was the aforementioned time he had once complained when I spent some
pocket money he gave us on a DC Comic I bought from the newsagent next to The
Astoria cinema; scouring the rack. etched forever in my memory, (the newsagent
featured in the occasional vividly intense dream since). But he probably couldn’t
afford the clubs, even if he did see them as a waste of money. A piece of plastic shit.
As they were of course, but that wasn't the point, the imagination did the rest. I felt
as if I couldn’t live without them. Anything new, I had to try it. A part of my life
would be 'missing'. I might be able to put together a spear and even a bow and arrow
like William of Richmal Crompton’s books, but a golf club was another matter. And
what good were the books when I couldn’t experience such things in the flesh so to
say?
In such moments I felt grown-ups were dull, narrow-minded and mean-spirited, as if
they had no memory of their own childhood. I soon forgot it in comparison to the
ship, a steamer, he took me on, or I'm guessing it was.. Perhaps[s it was nothing to
do with London, another time and place. But I think it was. As a WW11 veteran he'd
have the good sense, the enterprise to think of that. (Years later, after my mum's
funeral, when my bro and me visited him and his dull wife, he'd tell us about the time
his mate's head went flying through the air and rolled past his feet. His feet, not his
unfortunate soldier buddy's).. He pointed out the wake as the prow cut through the
water as we leaned over the rails. He was in his element. I was just as fascinated. In
retrospect, it seems madly irresponsible to be hanging over the rails of a ship. I think
it was an old steamer, as I say. I had a head for heights. It didn’t bother me, so I
didn’t give it a second thought. He was 'cool.' If I’d fallen over, I’ve no doubt he’d
be straight there in after me. Years later, he told me once, that when he he’d been out
drinking down by the docks (a notorious area, I later realised, as that's where the
hookers sold their wares) – this, back in Dundee – and as he couldn’t quite see where
he was in the dark, no doubt the worse for ware with the booze, he fell into the
harbour; but as he was a competent swimmer, and the water must have been cold, he
soon came to . I’ll bet it sobered him up though.