Desperate Measures

I stayed at Bill and Jill’s place in Chingford Hall Estate. They needed the extra dough and I needed a place to crash after breaking up with P in Dublin. I was working shifts in a care home in Woodford so I didn’t really see much of them. Bill was the most shiftless bastard you could ever meet, but true to that breed, he thought he was gods-gift. About five foot two with short bandy legs, he dressed in goth-black and gazed at his Lemmy-black hair and side-burns in the mirror. He had spawned a child with Jill and the three of them lived in squalor on this shit-hole estate where people threw their garbage out of the window, too lazy even to take it to the chute.

As became apparent to everyone except Bill, Jill was busy running off with a millionaire builder she’d met in the pub she worked in on the Mount. When she finally fled the nest Bill fell apart. So self-absorbed was he that he couldn’t believe that Jill could aspire to anyone but himself. As he’d often drunkenly proclaimed in his lazy Plymouth burr, he was ‘brilliant at shaggin’”, so why would any woman seek pastures new?

It hit him so hard that he fell from self-indulgence to the only other place his character knew – self-pity. And a pitiful sight he became. Crying and pleading like a child he was, as Jill sent him packing back to his mother in Hounslow (a strange woman who used to bring him a copy of The Beano when she visited). He still had a key to the flat though, and one day he returned to find the flat empty. Seeing empty champagne bottles around the kitchen bin he began to rummage. In the bin itself he found plastic wraps which had contained cocaine. He proceeded to lick these in the hope that any residue would give him a little relief from his pain and despair.

 When he told me this, it struck me as profoundly sad. To seek succour from the leavings of your former lovers, probably sex-fuelled, shenanigans with her rich, new boyfriend, this seemed low, even for Bill.