Other than my parents splitting up, nothing much has happened recently

Other than my parents splitting up, nothing much has happened recently. Actually, come to think of it that’s a lie. I lost my virginity the other day, which is quite a big deal, I guess, a rite of passage, as they say. I didn’t fancy the girl I lost my virginity to and I’m pretty sure she didn’t fancy me either, but we were drunk at some party and I had condoms on me, so we both figured why not. It didn’t take long and although I found it somewhat cathartic, it wasn’t exactly what I would call enjoyable. Plus it was awkward with the girl afterwards, who for some reason started talking about her parents and how they’d split up recently. Which is kind of a coincidence if you think about it. I tried to give the girl some reassurance, but in reality I just wanted to get the hell away from her because the more I looked at her the more I realised she was borderline disfigured ugly. I’m sorry, but it’s true. I myself am ugly and I think if you’re ugly it’s fine to call other people ugly, but only if they actually are. If they aren’t and you are, that makes you a bad person in my book, bad in a vindictive sort of way. Whereas if they are and you aren’t, that makes you malevolent, which isn’t a good look for anyone, probably worse in fact than being vindictive.

My dad has just knocked on the front door, which my mum immediately flings open, as if she has been waiting by the door for him to knock all along. She starts shouting at him, telling him what a no-good fuck he is etc etc. I can hear my dad saying precisely nothing in response, which is just like him. I pull on my Paddington Bear duffel and go to the front door. My dad winks at me and I nod knowingly. I tell my mum I’m going out for a bit. She says something like do what the fuck you like and then slams the door. I shake my head in the manner of someone expressing incredulity and my dad does likewise. Then we both laugh. Oh how we laugh.

My dad takes me to the bowling alley and we play a couple of games. My dad has a great bowling action, but is totally inaccurate. Whereas my bowling action is ludicrously awkward, but for some reason I have this uncanny ability to knock all the pins down. So inevitably I thrash my dad. He takes it in great humour because that’s the type of guy he is. We go from the bowling alley to a pub in the same entertainment complex, which is eerily quiet. My dad buys me a pint of brown ale. I don’t ask for it, but he buys it assuming that I want it, which isn’t the case: in reality, I would have preferred a pint of cider. As we sip our drinks, we have a conversation. He asks me how school is going (it’s college, not school, but I don’t correct him). I say it’s going okay, but I don’t elaborate, I know better than to give him details he isn’t going to be interested in. I ask him how work’s going and he says not bad, although one of his colleagues died recently and it’s kind of made everyone in the office really sad and reflective. I express shock about his colleague dying and my dad says it’s okay, that he wasn’t close to this colleague and so he’s not really been that badly affected. After that there is silence. Actually, come to think of it there is the background noise of the pub, but what I mean is that we don’t say anything to each other. Not for a while anyway. Which is fine, this is one of the things I like best about my dad, that I can be in his company without feeling the need to speak or be spoken to.

Once we’ve finished our pints, we go back to my dad’s apartment. It’s the first time I’ve been inside. It smells musty and there are patches of mould on the walls. My dad makes spaghetti and we eat it watching a soap opera on the telly. The soap opera is not one I normally watch. It seems very shrill and melodramatic. As I watch it, I imagine a story in my mind unfolding. It’s about a kid whose parents split up acrimoniously. They fight for custody of their kid in a court of law and the judge, who for some reason has terrible acne, decides that neither parent is competent enough to look after the child and awards custody to the state. The state secretes the child in a facility for orphans and waifs. Bad things happen to the child in the facility, so he decides to run away. He hitchhikes a ride with a bearded trucker to a city built alongside a river that is so wide it seems more like a lake than a river. He falls in with a crowd of artists and becomes a poet. Yes, I think, a poet specialising in a kind of poetry that is as indecipherable as it is romantic, as unreadable as it is profound. At this point, I realise my dad is speaking to me. He wants to know if it’s okay if his friend comes over. What friend? I say suspiciously, as if he doesn’t have any friends. Olga, he replies. Olga, I think, who the hell is Olga? Sure, I say, it’s your apartment, why are you even asking me? Because you’re my son, he replies, and I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable. It’s okay dad, I say, I won’t feel uncomfortable and even if I did, which I’m sure I won’t, it’s not for me to tell you whether you can or can’t have a friend over. Thanks son, he says. No problem dad, I say. Also, I think she’s bringing her daughter, says my dad, thought it might be nice if you met each other. Oh okay, I say.

Olga shows up a few minutes later, as if she’d been outside the building waiting for the nod from my dad, which is almost certainly the case in fact. I barely register what she looks like when my dad says this is Olga, because stood next to her is the girl I lost my virginity to. The girl seems unsurprised to see me. Hey, she says, raising a hand in salutation. I say hey back, try to act nonplussed. You know each other? says my dad. Kinda, I say. Kinda? says the girl I lost my virginity to. She sounds offended or maybe mock offended, it’s hard to tell. How do you know each other? says Olga distinctly suspiciously, who I notice for the first time is an attractive woman, far more attractive than her daughter. We just do, says the girl I lost my virginity to enigmatically. She smiles at me conspiratorially and in spite of myself I find myself smiling back.

It turns out the girl I lost my virginity to is very funny. I hadn’t noticed that on the night I lost my virginity to her. She doesn’t tell jokes exactly, she just has a way of putting things that make them seem hilarious, maybe unintentionally, but so what, funny is funny. She cracks my dad up as well; in fact, I can’t recall the last time I heard him guffawing with such gusto. Olga, however, is less impressed and seems jealous of the attention her daughter is getting. After a while, Olga’s scowling and eye-rolling gets too much for me and I suggest to the girl I lost my virginity to that we maybe go out for a bit, have a wander. She seems surprised, but is amenable to the idea, so we leave my dad and Olga to their date, if that is what it is and head out into town. My dad has given me enough money to do pretty much anything we want to do. What do you fancy doing? I ask when we get off the bus at the harbour (which is where all the cool things to do in the town are located). I was thinking a meal, maybe a few drinks, perhaps a movie, but it turns out the girl I lost my virginity to wants to steal a car. Steal a car? I ask disbelievingly. Yes, she says. I inhale through my nose, rub my chin as if pondering something, although in fact my mind is blanker than a void. Finally, I say, No, we are not stealing a car. Don’t be such a dufus, she says. A dufus? I say. Yeah, you know, aka a dick, aka a wuss, aka a spineless gimp. I hold my hand up. I say, Okay, enough already with the disparaging epithets. We cannot steal a car, okay? We can do anything other than that. I have plenty of money. I pull out a thick bundle of notes from my back pocket. See, I say. See how much money I have. The girl I lost my virginity to looks at the money and shakes her head obstinately. I don’t care how much money you’ve got. What I want to do and what I insist we do is steal a car. Okay? The expression on her face is so fiercely resolute that I realise it will be impossible for me to dissuade her, so I say okay, you win, let’s steal a car, why the fuck not. The girl I lost my virginity wants to steal a Mercedes S-Class Cabriolet, but I tell her it’s better to steal something less conspicuous. Less chance of getting pulled over, I explain in the manner of someone who knows what they’re talking about, which I don’t of course. She doesn’t agree with me exactly, but she doesn’t disagree either, so we end up stealing a Fiat Uno. It’s palm leaf-green and the seats have leather upholstery. I smash the driver’s window with my elbow and then I realise I have no idea how to start the thing. I google how to hotwire a car on my phone. There are various YouTube videos showing you how to do it. I go with the one that has the most views even though it has less likes than the other videos. The guy isn’t the most articulate YouTuber in the world, but he knows a shit ton about hotwiring cars and in next to no time I’ve got the Fiat Uno started and we’re away. Of course, I have no idea how to drive. But how difficult can it be? I say to the girl I lost my virginity to. Turns out more difficult than you would imagine or at least I imagined. We screech and lurch a fair bit and I keep turning the windscreen wipers on and off without knowing how. Eventually, however, I get the hang of it.

We drive out of town and along the motorway toward a city I have heard a lot about but never been to. We stop off once for a pee/poo stop, otherwise I just keep driving, as the girl I lost my virginity to regales me with stories. She tells me about her disabled dad cheating on her mum with a disabled man he met at a club for disabled people. She tells me about her younger brother’s descent into madness. She tells me about her elder brother’s unrequited love of wealth and fame. She tells me about the friends she slept with on principle and the friends she slept with because she had to and the friends she slept with because she was bored and the friends she slept with because she felt sorry for them and the friends she slept with for absolutely no reason whatsoever. She tells me about how she extorted money from a lecherous schoolteacher. She tells me plenty of other things besides, things that I don’t really pay much attention to (there’s only so much storytelling, after all, that one can take on a single car journey). Eventually we get to the city. We park up in a suburb with bay-windowed houses and very bright streetlamps. We canoodle in the back of the Fiat Uno for a while. At some point, I realise, with a suddenness that feels like a punch to the midriff, that I am maybe starting to fall for the girl I lost my virginity to. Oh my, I think, oh my, oh my, oh my.

The canoodling results in two orgasms. One for her, one for me. After that, I start the car up again and we drive further into the city, into its belly if you want a metaphor. We park up outside a kebab shop, inside which a man with a haughty hirsute face is slicing at a hunk of doner meat with a machete menacingly. We stride gaily from there to a kind of plaza or an actual plaza. It is enclosed on all sides by bars and restaurants. I go to one of them and order cocktails that are served in watermelon husks with humungous straws protruding out of them. We slurp our cocktails sitting on high stools at a chrome table. As we slurp, I tell stories, stories that involve unfeasible acts of derring-do and unlikely intrigue and in which I am cast as the protagonist. At some point, I start telling the girl I lost my virginity to a story which begins with me breakdancing on a street corner. Hold on a minute, she says, did you just say ‘breakdancing on a street corner’? Yes, I say. She seems impressed. She says she’s never met someone who breakdanced on street corners before. I tell her I specialise in the caterpillar and the windmill, as it happens. She says she doesn’t know what that means. I tell her they’re moves, breakdancing moves. She asks me to show her. Naturally, I try to change the subject, but she persists. Show me, she chants repetitively whilst clapping her hands in a syncopated fashion. Fine, okay, I say eventually, but you have to beatbox. To her credit, she starts beatboxing (she’s very good at it actually). I get off my stool, try not to make eye contact with anyone at any of the tables in the vicinity. I rock on the top for a bit, just to set the scene, and then I swan dive seamlessly into a caterpillar. After undulating for a while I transition into a whirring windmill, from which I flip up onto my feet and, perhaps because I am overstimulated or perhaps for no reason, I launch into an extempore body-popping routine. I hear whoops and whistling and the sound of people clapping and cheering. Just for them, I do another swan dive and another caterpillar, although this one is a backwards caterpillar, and then as a final flourish, I do a headspin. When I’m done spinning, I flip up onto my feet again and after a little body-popping bow I go and sit back down on my stool. The girl I lost my virginity to says that was amazing and I can tell by the way she is looking at me that she really means it. We have a couple more cocktails and then go to a nightclub. The bouncers eye me suspiciously on the way in and one of them pats me down with a vigour that borders on the inappropriate. Finally, he takes his hands off me and grunts for me to go on in. I am offered drugs almost as soon as I step into the nightclub by a guy with bugged-out eyes slouching near the gents. I ask him what he’s got and he elucidates. There are too many tempting options for me to be able to make my mind up as to what I want, so in the end I hedge my bets by buying three ecstasy pills, a wrap of ketamine and two microdots. I neck a pill and so does the girl I lost my virginity to. We head off to the dancefloor. The girl I lost my virginity to dances suggestively, as I might have expected if I had thought about it in advance. At some point, everything goes squishy or maybe cartoony is a better way of putting it. I suddenly feel a compulsive need to tell the girl I lost my virginity to that I love her, so I do. She says she knows. She says she feels the same about me. She says we should elope. Elope? I say. Elope, she confirms. I think about it for a moment, a moment in which time seems to rinse itself of meaning. Then I say: Okay, yeah, fuck it, let’s do it! And I kiss the girl I lost my virginity to spontaneously: on her mouth, her nose, her forehead, her cleavage, her arms, her fingers, her neck and then her cleavage again.

***

We leave the nightclub immediately and head to the train station, where we buy two tickets to Gretna Green from a sour-faced ticket counter operative who processes our transaction at a turtle-like pace. We have two changes and then it’s a straight run on an overnight train. Fancy a microdot? I ask the girl I lost my virginity to when we’ve made ourselves comfortable in the smoking carriage of the overnight train. To help pass the time, I add. Sure, she says, why not. So we bosh the microdots. A few stops later a couple of punks get on the train and come and sit opposite us. One of them has a blue mohican and piercings in his lips, earlobes and eyebrows. When he smiles, he reveals a mouth of unruly tea-coloured teeth. The other punk has a green mohican and her face has been lathered with a white paste, which provides a stark contrast to her eyes (ringed with purple) and lips (painted black). She doesn’t seem to smile, so I couldn’t say what colour her teeth are, although if I were to guess I would say custard yellow. That, anyway, is what I find myself speculating about as I am coming up on the microdot. The banality of the prelude to the acid trip belies the profundity of the rest of it: ego death, rebirth, ramifying counterfactuals, nondual immanence, the thing-in-itself laid bare in all its ineffable glory. In the last throes of the trip, I chain-smoke contemplatively and make the most of the geometric visuals. At some point, the girl I lost my virginity to sits down beside me. Miss me? she says. I had no idea she’d even gone anywhere, but I say: yes, a great deal. She smiles at that. She says she’s been in the toilet the whole time staring at herself in the mirror. I say that’s not a good idea when you’re tripping your nuts off on a microdot. Tell me something I don’t know, she says. We laugh at that and the punks sitting opposite laugh too, which makes me feel a bit paranoid to be honest.

Turns out the punks are okay. Turns out the punks are eloping in Gretna Green, just like us. They agree to witness our marriage ceremony and we agree to witness theirs. We get married in a registry office above a fish and chip shop. The officiator is a ruddy-faced man with oversized glasses. He speaks very fast and is barely intelligible. When the service is over, the officiator takes a photo of us using a Polaroid hanging from his neck. It’s a terrible photo of me, but the girl I lost my virginity to, who I suppose I must now refer to as my wife, looks delectable. I tell her this and she blushes. She says something about love being blind and I tell her that my love has twenty-twenty vision.

We go for a post-nuptial pint with the punks. The pub we go to is full of goths, stinks of B.O. and has occult symbols daubed on the walls in red paint or perhaps blood. The atmosphere is the right side of jaunty. As we’re guzzling our beers, the blue-haired punk tells the somewhat formulaic yet also titillating story of how he and the green-haired punk met and how eventually, against all odds, and in spite of the naysayers, fell in love with each other. Then my wife explains how we met and how we fell in love with each other. For some reason she omits what I consider to be important details and embellishes or even makes up others. I resist the urge to correct her version of events and simply smile and nod along as if in complete concurrence.

We exchange contact details with the punks and then we say our goodbyes. We take a pedal-powered tuk-tuk to a guesthouse. Our room has a view of a wall. We sleep for a bit and then we go to a pizza place that has an eat-as-much-as-you-like buffet offer. I manage eight slices and my wife somehow gets twelve down her throat. She belches and then apologises for belching. I say, Don’t be silly, if you can’t belch in front of your husband who can you belch in front of? I guess, says my wife in an unsure manner, all the same, I’ll try to keep it to a minimum. Fair enough, I say.

We go back to the guesthouse and snort the ketamine. Whilst we are having sex, I suddenly find myself above my body looking down at it thrusting away at my wife, who is on all fours, boobs wiggling ten to the dozen (if you’ll forgive the use of the much-overused idiom). I stay like this for a while and then I go back into my body and resume my first-person perspective. By this time, I have ejaculated and I’m smoking a cigarette. I have a long conversation with my wife that loops around like a Scalextrix track and then we fall asleep. When I wake up, I kiss my wife on her lips. It feels good. It doesn’t even matter that her breath is mephitic. In fact, I love the smell of her putrid breath. I love everything about her.

***

Our marriage goes about as well as you could expect it to, given how callow we are. I graduate from college and go and work for a graphic design company. After several false starts, my wife winds up becoming an actress, bagging bit-part roles on television mainly, but also the odd gig here or there in the theatre. The sex dries up after a few years. Naturally, we have affairs to compensate, but we’re discreet and neither of us allows any dalliance to become too serious. At the end of the day, we still love each other regardless of whether we fuck each other or not. We never have kids because: a) neither of us want them and b) we’d have to have sex to create them. I become quite successful at what I do for a living, eventually starting my own company and inking deals with lots of clients that I poach from my erstwhile and none-too-happy employer. My wife’s acting career, on the other hand, never really takes off and in the end, it kind of fizzles out, like a damp firework you might say, if you’ll excuse the shitty synonym. For a while she is lost. She spends weeks on end moping around the house, dressed in a robe, smoking feverishly, a dazed look in her eyes. Just at the point I am considering suggesting to her she maybe get some professional help, she snaps out of it. She has decided, she says, to become a writer. Apparently, it’s something she’s always wanted to do, although I don’t recall a single occasion in which she has expressed this aspiration before. I give her my wholehearted support, not that she needs it and she sets to work bashing away on her laptop keyboard like a madwoman, day and night, for weeks, months on end. Finally, she has a manuscript that she says she’s moderately happy with. I ask her to define ‘moderately happy with’ and she says: not making me want to puke. Fair enough, I say. She asks me if I’ll read it and I say sure. I’m very busy with my own shit as it happens, but I know how important this is to her, so I delegate all my stress to the number two at my graphic design company – a gay guy who has, I’m fairly certain, an unhealthy interest in my bottom – and settle down to read the novel.

The novel is very good. In the literary sense of the word ‘good’. Meaning there is only the vaguest semblance of a plot. I like it, I tell her, I like it a lot. You’re just saying that, she says coyly, you don’t really mean it. I do, I protest, honestly. What is it then about the book you like? she says. Er, I say, well the characters for one thing. What about them? Well, you know, they’re, um, well rounded. Well rounded? Is that all you can think of to say? Look, I’m not a book critic at the end of the day. My skillset is drawing. All I can say is I enjoyed reading it.

My wife sends the book off to a bunch of agents and gets no replies, then sends the book off to another gaggle of them and this time receives a few rejection slips. My wife’s mental health, never robust, teeters on the brink of a significant ratchet downwards. I have to do something, I think. So unbeknownst to my wife, I arrange to have her book edited and then published in a digital format by some company that specialises in this type of thing and then I get the marketing team at my company to bang the social media drum and all of that jazz. To my delight, the book gets some traction, even winding up on some list for promising self-published debut novels. At this point, I feel the time is propitious to explain to my wife what I’ve done. At first, she is angry. How could you go behind my back like that? she keeps saying. Then she realises that even though her reputation as a writer has been besmirched by resorting to self-publishing, an indignity made even more painful by the fact that the decision to stoop that low was made on her behalf, she has to admit it is rather gratifying to see how many books she’s sold and to read all those warm-hearted reviews on Amazon, many of which my marketing team planted anonymously, although of course I don’t tell my wife that.

Pretty soon after that my wife snags an agent and shortly thereafter a publishing deal that comes with a hefty advance. She spends the money on a work of art entitled ‘sketch of a penis’ (which is in fact a sketch of a penis) by an artist who has a long history of saying and doing controversial things and who my wife thinks is a genius (I’m not convinced personally, but what do I know). My wife writes another book, a memoir this time. It’s fairly shocking to find out about some of the things she’s been getting up to during all those sexless years we’ve spent together. In fact, it’s more than shocking, it’s disgusting. In a fit of pique, I move out of our house and into my dad’s apartment, which he has retained the ownership of even though I think technically he was supposed to have renounced all of his worldly goods when he took his monastic vows. I sell the business to my number two and I invest the proceeds in a well-diversified portfolio, which is perhaps a little too skewed toward exotic alternative assets, but what is the point of living if you don’t take risks every now and again?

I take to walking the streets at night, by virtue of which I meet a lot of tenebrous characters. One thing leads to another and I wind up with quite a significant cocaine habit. I lose weight and my hair starts to come out in clumps. I wear the same clothes day in, day out. I stop washing and brushing my teeth. I eat only if I absolutely have to. The rubbish piles up in the apartment and I frequently see mice scampering around me as I snort yet another line. When I start losing teeth, I realise I have to get a grip or I might as well just sign my own death warrant. For want of knowing what else to do, I go and see my mum. She lives on a barge with another woman called Sylvie. When my mum sees me, she bursts into tears. Oh, she says, my poor, poor boy! She makes me have a bowl of onion soup – it always was her answer to everything – and then she fills me in on her life. High-level summary: it’s going okay, although she could do with being wealthier, healthier and happier. For my part, I tell her about moving out of the marital home, walking the streets late at night, my spiralling coke addiction (although I spare her the grisly details). My mum’s lacrimal glands swing into action again and Sylvie, who as usual is a totally silent and somewhat disconcerting presence, puts an arm around her. My mum tells me she had a feeling this would happen to me one day. It’s your dad, she says, that shit-for-brains idiot is responsible for this. If he’d been around more…And so my mum launches into an extended diatribe against my dad and I realise for the umpteenth time that she isn’t there for me and never was and that all she’s really good for is onion soup, which I can either make or buy for myself at the end of the day. So I take my leave of her and go pay my dad a visit. Why I didn’t just go and see him in the first place, I have no idea.

The hermitage doesn’t conform to my preconceptions. Essentially, it’s a drab-looking terraced house plonk in the middle of a council estate. The front garden is bursting with weeds, the paint is peeling on all of the window frames and the guttering is falling off the walls. When I ring the doorbell, it’s my dad who answers. His head is shaved and he’s wearing a saffron robe with a purple sash slung over one shoulder. He smiles at me, a weird beatific smile that seems of a piece with the transfixed expression in his eyes. Hi dad, I say. Come on in, he says, I’ve been expecting you. Expecting me? Yes, he says. And for some reason, as I step over the threshold into a dingy house that smells of incense and mould, I get a strong sense of déjà vu.