Raymond Gilderoy walked a lonely road. He had gained only a
nominal qualification in his forty-seven years and that was Queen’s Award for Being Misunderstood.
The word enigma could have been
invented for him. Chameleons studied versions of his life – and there were many
versions – in seminars and lecture halls. They learned from him how better to
‘hide and appear, hide and appear’. For them, he was a master of disguise. Little
did they know that Raymond Gilderoy had no more idea of his perceived skills in
this area as he did of the laws of molecular physics and, lord knows, he knew
little enough of those.
Raymond was a classic Kristoffian ‘walking contradiction,
partly truth and partly fiction’ and he knew not the effect he had on others.
His kindness was seen as weakness, his weakness as kindness, and all his
strengths lay in subtleties and nuances so subtle and nuanced that they were
glimpsed less often than meteors and those that glimpsed them were left so
puzzled that they knew not whether to be profoundly impressed or deeply
insulted.
He belonged to no class or genre, no club or society suited him. At meetings of LonersAnonymous people pointed at him
and asked “who’s that lonely looking guy over there?” He stood alone at
parties, not that he was invited to them anymore. He dreaded ‘breaking for
coffee’ at training courses as folk mingled with anyone except him. Even his
own anatomy betrayed him at these events as his innards whined and howled
distinctly louder than anyone else’s as
if they were bidding for help to escape.
Even his mother never let him end a sentence; often pointing
to objects outside the window at random so fearful was she of his obscure
mutterings.
“Look at that bird that’s just landed on old Effie’s
roof!” she’d yell, then follow this up
with a precipitative offer of more tea.
She knew that no-one could fuck a life up to such apparently
irredeemable effect as her own eldest son.
Everything he touched, every opportunity he was given, every
relationship he became entangled with turned to abject shite.
He knew not how to play the game of life.
Standing six foot four and as thin as a rake he stood out
like a scarecrow in every crowd. He had a lifelong fear that his head was too
small for his body; like he’d been painted by a bad artist weak on perspective.
He felt his head belonged to a body at least a foot shorter. This had left him
with the impression that his voice was ‘far away’ and that people, having to crane
to hear it, very quickly tired of doing so.
At job interviews he leaned forward so hyper-extendedly that
his questioners drew back nervously in their chairs and decided by osmosis
never to share a work-place with him.
Yes, his was a lonely road, and he sometimes yearned to be
at the end of it, though he had a sense of the sinfulness of such thoughts.
“Life is sweet” his Uncle Billy had ventured while busy
dying of cancer and Raymond tried to live up to the simple profundity of this
statement no matter how sour his reality often felt.
“How did you make life sweet?” What a question. And was
there not an answer to every question?
A mixture of attitude and circumstances, there-in should lie
the answer.
Maybe habits too? Maybe that’s what they called ‘a rut’. “My
life’s in a rut” you’d hear people say, and what they’d mean is they’d got into
a boring routine – a rut!
What is happiness? How does it manifest itself? Is it simply
contentment? He’d heard it expressed
thus.
OK! Happiness and contentment;
why not go for both?
Such were his thoughts as he went to visit his friend, Mad
Betty in Leytonstone where she lived in her new one-bed flat.
All his friends were mad; either mad or what others would
call losers. Certainly they were outsiders, living on the verges of what we
call society. Diagnosed bi-polar, paranoid-schizophrenic and claiming the
appropriate benefits.
His oldest friend Moishe had once told him that he suspected
his dentist of deliberately drilling holes in his teeth. The rationale for this
was that Moishe would have to keep going for treatment, and the dentist would
make more money from him. Raymond had said, that sounds terrible, why don’t you
change your dentist? Moishe said “O he’s handy; he’s only ten minutes down the
road”.
Raymond laughed until he thought he’d wet himself. Moishe
was only laughing to join in.
This is what happened to outsiders cast adrift by the
conventional; your only option was other outsiders. You congregated ashamedly
with others of the same ilk. This didn’t make for a proud assemblage. What was
left unspoken but what was completely understood by each involved was that this
was a pact of failure – failure to fit in anywhere else.
Raymond had recently worked in a large office where this
phenomenon was illustrated perfectly, though certainly not for the first time.
Banished as a virtual undesirable by the mainly young things in his ‘team’ he naturally
becomes the prey of other undesirables. They can spot one another a mile off.
They catch the scent of others rejection like sad perfume wafting through
gloomy corridors. One, a beardy, corduroy type, had the habit of saying an
exaggerated swooping ‘moooorning’ as he plodded into the office. The youngsters
of course think this is risibly funny and make jokes about him. This man is to
become Raymond’s lunch-time companion. He bores him rigid about his job
detecting ‘internet abuse’ in the department. He slurps his soup and catches much
of it in his beard.
Of another fellow inmate, one day a friendly female
colleague tells him “Tam seems to have taken a shine to you; he doesn’t
normally talk to the men”.
Tam wears his Scouts uniform to work.
Not that Raymond would necessarily have wanted things any
other way. He found ‘conventional’ people, to the extent that such existed, to
be rather boring with all their talk of cars and mortgages, kids and holidays.
People who lived out-with these things or, more precisely, without such things, in general had more interesting tales to tell.
Put it this way,
you’re less likely to find yourself cowering behind a sofa at the most intense
point of an LSD trip while someone is throwing claw-hammers at you, if you’re
saving up for your honeymoon in Gran Canarias and putting a deposit down on a
little two-bedroom place
Such was not part of the careful flow of conventional lives.
Mad Betty was not conventional, although Raymond sensed that
she deeply wanted to be. He could see her in a little two-up two-down with a
big hairy husband and two adorable kids, but things just hadn’t turned out that
way. Presently she was living with a Turkish cross-dresser and handing out
business cards to tube-travellers offering ‘All services negotiable’ from the
little dry-cleaning kiosk she worked in.
Here’s a question. How do you achieve happiness when you
don’t know what makes you happy?
Mad Betty was once ‘happy’, but she couldn’t stand it.
Mad Betty was once in a state of such happiness she had to
systematically destroy it.
Go figure! As they say in New York.
Raymond had never seen a ‘bi-polar’ condition until he saw
it in Mad Betty. There were times when she could rule the world; striding the
streets of Leytonstone in her big red woolly cardy performing wondrous tasks
and favours like some twenty-three stone female Jesus. She had got Raymond and
his mates gigs by simply demanding them from publicans, she could arrange your
room like some Feng Shui Queen,
scattering cushions, tacking Arabic rugs to walls in perfect symmetry to sofas
and beds acquired from her many middle-class, Stoke Newington friends. You
would suddenly own a keyboard, a guitar, an Armenian box zither. Before, you
were living in a bedsit in Grove Green Road, now you were living on a magic
carpet in a souk in Marrakech.
Then the awful slump would come.
The extraordinary energy and vitality of the ‘highs’ would
lead to a dreadful plummeting into the lonely, weeping, darkness of the ‘lows’.
She told Raymond once that during the high times she was constantly and terrifyingly
aware of what was to follow. She could sense the tornado losing speed and power
and witness herself falling to the depths of despair.
She would disappear for weeks and months. Shacked up in a
room in someone’s house, she’d never say where. If she picked up the phone at
all, she couldn’t articulate through the tears, breathless, endless sobs, the
sound of a heart breaking or broken, until you decided it was cruel to phone at
all and you were left only with concern for her. Raymond was a master at making
crying women laugh, but even he had to admit defeat faced with this.
Then, one day she’d re-appear as if none of it had ever
happened. Wouldn’t make reference to it, and ignored anyone who did and you’d
find yourself dragged out of a pub and on a flight to Paris with her, courtesy
of more money owed to American Express.
The Leytonstone area used to be quite a smart, trendy wee
place but these days it was ‘seeing its arse a bit’ as a Liverpudlian may have
put it. It still had the forest going for it and the Hollow Ponds but the A10 extension,
against which many had demonstrated, had ripped a chunk of the Bohemian soul
out of it.
Conveniently, it hadn’t had the same effect on neighbouring,
Tory-controlled Wanstead where they’d buried it underground out of harm’s way,
only for it to emerge spewing its fumes and concrete into the very heart of
Leytonstone. Gone was the old red-brick asylum to be replaced by giant Tesco’s
with ubiquitous car-park; gone was the classic Bearman’s department store to be
replaced by Matalan; Leytonstone High Street, once so neat and semi-prosperous,
was now littered with 99p shops and ‘pay-day loan’ companies.
The de-generation of a town. You only really see the full
extent of it if you’ve been away a while. Long term denizens like Mad Betty
barely even noticed.
During the working hours of between eight-thirty am and six
pm she barely knew anything about the town other than what part of its itinerant
population passed through the confines of the tube station. She occupied the
little kiosk next to the newsagents and opposite the ticket office.
Occasionally the phone would ring and startle her from her reverie, or
unspeakable boredom as it otherwise may be termed. It would be the little Greek
proprietor of the Dry Cleaners ‘upstairs’ on Church Street. Betty would take in
items from punters at the kiosk, and they would be shipped upstairs for Dry
Cleaning, then sent back down for collection. All Betty had to do was keep a
record of who the items belonged to, when they were due for collection and, of
course, take the money that was owed. Some days were busier than others, but
whichever way you looked at it, this was dull stuff. The only thing that
brightened it up were the strange acquaintances she would garner through the
course of the day.
There was the little Indian bloke keen to convert her to his
ideas about re-incarnation. He’d provide literature in the form of little
pamphlets and booklets for her to read, then he’d come back to discuss them
with her later. If one were looking for the darkly comic, Raymond had once
suggested, you could see it as some sort of psychic offering of a way out of
her current turgid existence, exemplified perfectly by her being imprisoned in
a kiosk in a tube station nine and a half hours, six days a week, and into the nirvana of an after-life. Maybe he was
her saviour, he suggested, and she’d better take better notice of his
teachings.
There were some who brought her flowers maybe in condolence
for her plight.
There were others with more lurid intentions.
Trapped as she was in her little commercial dungeon she was
prey to every sad weirdo and pervert within a five-mile radius and beyond. One
of these was a tinker from Kent who Betty referred to as ‘Big Nose’ and the
utility of his large proboscis was the cause of much hilarity to Raymond at a
not-much-later date.
“With his nose?” he’d ask incredulously whilst leaning on
the little hatch of her kiosk.
“Absolutely” she’d reply “Fucking expert with it”
Mad Betty was no prude. She didn’t call it sex she called it passion. A socialist to her bones, Marx’s dictum ‘from each
according to his ability to each according to his need’ applied just as much to
physical pleasure as it did to money and food. It wasn’t promiscuity it was
simply human sharing.
The fact that it sometimes involved gimp masks was neither
here nor there.
Sometimes she’d be crying in her little kiosk. Punters would
ask concernedly “are you OK?” and she would make up lies about recent
bereavements or colds and allergies. But, in some ways, she was just crying
about ending up working in her little kiosk underground.
Raymond stopped to sit in Forest Glade. In his mind he saw
himself, his father and his younger brother Alan playing cricket in the
clearing. Well, it wasn’t really cricket; it was one of the daft games his
father would come up with.
His Dad was a great one for making up games. Squares in the
carpet would become targets to roll marbles into, or bunkers on the fairways of
golf courses he’d contrived. He’d made a cricket bat at his work (he was a woodwork
machinist to trade) and they’d play out on the little square of grass behind
the flats in East Kilbride. He’d devise the scoring so that you’d bet four for
hitting the bin, six for hitting the clothes pole, and so on.
Later, for these games in Forest Glade, he’d insist they
changed their names. Raymond would be Benjamin Netanyahu; his brother would be
Bishop Muzorewa. Even in play his Dad had been political, although what the
politics of Israel and Zimbabwe respectively had to do with family cricket in
Leytonstone was never made clear.
He must have been proud of that old bat for it to travel
over borders with them.
A work-mate of his Dads had once offered him the opinion
that he was “neither fish nor fowl”.
Maybe he too was a chameleon.
Life seemed simpler back then in the mid-Seventies. That
summer of 1976. There were cows that grazed on the fringes of Epping Forest.
They’d sometime stray over Whipps Cross Road and further onto the residential
streets. Big old cows roaming along Dyson Road, mooing at folk as if they owned
the place.
It was a time of fresh discovery, moving down from Glasgow
to this even bigger city. Although, if you’ve ever lived in London you’ll know
that even though it’s London, you just live in your wee bit of it. You’d only
really go ‘up west’ for a special treat or if you worked there.
Raymond hadn’t taken to at first. Leaving Glasgow had been
hard on him, though God knows he wasn’t built, physically or emotionally, for
survival in that tough city. Possibly, it was just the shock of the new and the
fact that no-one seemed to understand his accent, or affected not to at any
rate. Typically, he became more Scottish now that he was away from the place.
Your male Scot abroad, especially in England, seems to have an over-powering
need to establish his credentials, and those credentials are pronouncedly
Caledonian.
Other than donning full highland kilt and wielding a
Claymore he could not have represented the archetype of his race any better.
The Scot, it seemed, was in London to drink and act pseudo-aggressively at
every turn. Only a year into his stay he was arrested on a tube train while
singing ‘Flower of Scotland’ to two plain-clothes policemen. They had been summoned by London Underground
staff as he’d entered their premises with beer glass half full and mouthing
incomprehensible oaths to one and all. Taken from the train to Francis Road
nick he’d been charged with creating a public nuisance and banged up for the
night. Two weeks later in court it the officer’s statement was read out to
general titters from those present…
“Not only was Mr Gilderoy unable to stand up, he was unable
to sit down either”
His mother and father were not best pleased.
Being neither fish nor fowl he chose drink as his common denominator,
or maybe it chose him. He was a drinking Scot and there’s no more consistent
identity than that. It wasn’t hard to find other Scots to drink with. It
couldn’t have been easier had there been a casting agency you rang up and asked
‘I need some fellow-Scots to drink with, two or three will do’ and they’d
appear almost instantly; bearded, bedraggled and cynical with newly received
Giro’s in hand.
One such was Andy McCartney, a man made for drink. Andy
looked like an angry Jacobite, or Groundskeeper Willie. A wee wiry flame haired
Jock, Andy was a drink machine. He and Raymond would become brothers in booze.
Going into his early twenties Raymond was a troubled and
aimless individual. He gave up an early job as a Clerical Officer with the
Inland Revenue to bugger off to France with two of the unlikeliest people
imaginable. The idea, very loosely was that they would visit Paris and busk.
That was about the sum total of it.
He’d met Moishe when he’d advertised for a singer for his
band. Moishe had turned up at his door and started singing. He was in his
mid-twenties, a single of child of Monty and Phyllis, an elderly Jewish couple
from Gants Hill. Phyllis was mentally ill and Monty pretended to be deaf so he
wouldn’t have to listen to her manipulative and destructive antics. Moishe was
the anxious, zany and totally dependent product of this crazy union.
Ray was a thirty year old virgin from Berwick-On-Tweed. Six years in the Army he was a man of almost
unmovable habit. If Tuesday was ‘laundry night’ then that was that, it couldn’t
easily be changed. Surprising then, that he could so easily be persuaded to
undertake this mad trip.
Moishe had only weeks before been let out of Goodmayes
Mental Hospital after a very serious suicide attempt when his life had only
just been saved, yet Phyllis and Monty had no difficulty in letting their only
son travel to France with two odd-balls and no conceivable itinerary or plan.
Strange!
Our first night in Calais we slept in the ruins of a castle,
and on the second day’s blazing sunshine we began to walk the twenty-odd
kilometres to Boulogne so that we could catch the motorway to Paris.
We hitched for lifts but three of us were never going to get
picked up so we decided to split up and meet in Paris. I, being seventeen and
mainly concerned with finishing the duty free whisky, was the obvious candidate
to look after Moishe, while RAY, with his army background was best equipped to
strike off on his own.
They watched their friend stride purposefully along the long
inclining road into the setting Flanders sun.
And then a storm of biblical proportions broke around them.
They had eventually gotten a lift from a well-meaning French
social worker with limited English. Moishe thought it funny to ask him
‘voulez-vouz mangez mon pantalon?’ which was not only a profoundly
inappropriate question but probably grammatically incorrect. Eventually the
kind man dropped them off at a camp-site, probably erroneously assuming that
they were properly equipped with tents and the like.
All they had were sleeping bags, and the only available
cover they could find was the camp toilet.
Sleeping, or rather, not sleeping at all, in a camp toilet
is a busy affair. People will insist on coming in and using it, usually for one
or another purpose and they generally don’t expect or appreciate anyone sprawled
on the floor in sleeping bags. Oaths are verbalised along the lines of ‘what
the fuck are you doing sprawled on the floor in the camp toilet?’ Aromas are
left and noises are made. It is generally not a pleasant ‘sleeping’
environment.
First light Raymond and Moishe decided very quickly not to
even attempt to hitch to Paris but, instead to jump on the first available
train to that most romantic of cities.
They found their friend Ray as planned under the Eiffel
Tower. He was trying to catch up on sleep on a bench in the Parc du Champ de
Mars. He’d hitch-hiked throughout the rainy, windy night and his sleep had been
disturbed by the Gendarmerie since the early hours.
They didn’t tell him they’d caught the train.
Raymond thought of all this as he walked along Colworth Road
and on towards the High Road. He looked down at the motorway where before there
used to be Fillebrook Road. He’d fallen in love on Fillebrook Road; made love
to Penny in a house on Fillebrook Road, now it didn’t even exist. He’d lost this
piece of his romantic history so that motorists could travel in and out of
London quicker.
Glaswegian drinking partners form close bonds. They very
quickly become like bosom brothers; like soldiers in the trenches; Battle of
Britain boys. There’s no closer male-bonding than Glaswegian piss-heads – at
least at the start. The relationship subsequently turns to hues and colours
more akin to bruises and bumps.
Raymond and Andy had painted Leytonstone a blurred shade of
red. Aided by the odd tax rebate and giro they had become the dynamic duo,
carousing and marauding around The Crown, The North Star and The Red Lion and
any other pubs that stood in their way. Two Glaswegian piss-heads in London, a
sight sometimes welcome and often dreaded.
Such was their camaraderie that even the sleeping hours
couldn’t part them. Andy shared a little bedsit on Colworth Road with his
girlfriend Theresa. Theresa was of feral Essex stock. Not intellectual in any
conceivable form (she once expressed the bizarre notion that Lester Piggot was
the Prime Minister of South Africa. Another famous time she was asked at the
Post Office to provide identification to which request she produced a signed
photograph of herself) she possessed however the cunning of a street-wise fox.
There was no shop in the area that was safe from her determination to obtain
credit. All that she required from Andy was that he fuck her frequently, give
her child, and slap her when she got out of line and these requirements he
willingly fulfilled.
So telling her that his new found friend in drink was going
to be sharing the nuptial bed was not going to present a problem.
Raymond had offered to sleep on the floor beside the bed but
Andy was adamant that there was room enough for three. There was nothing but
manly and practical purpose behind this, no hint of any undue shenanigans was
ever on the agenda, just a friendly, drunken arrangement.
Bit weird when they started shagging though….!
