K

K.

When it rained the raindrops reflected, enlarged on the wall behind my bed.
A large streetlamp outside, over the ring road ensured that the room was almost always blue. Even during the daylight hours because the clock in the lamp was always broken. The room was always cold.
One square waffle of the ancient and dangerous gas fire worked. The others hissed menacingly. Trying to light it was the most dangerous time.
I brought in a small electric fire but the landlord broke in and smashed it. He also, although I could never prove it, stole some of my favourite books and records. He locked the door on his way out, so who else could it have been?

The smashing of my little fire meant that I usually spent weekends in bed because of the cold. The bed that looked and felt like a contour map of the Himalayas.

One year, I think it was my second, I decided not to go home for the holidays. I would stay and work in the studio. Or to be rather more honest, I would stay and pretend to work. I had been told I was in danger of failing the year. I suppose this worried me somewhat. Although with hindsight I cannot feel I was overly concerned.
I was what was laughingly called a Fine Art Student. I painted, when the mood, booze, dope and my friends took me.

Whatever, I had just finished an affair. I suppose, being honest, she was the one who finished it. Because I talked in my sleep, because there was someone else, because she was gay and didn’t know how to tell me, because I was a nice bloke and deserved someone better, because she didn’t love me anymore. I don’t know. These have all been used excuses.

She packed up home to Mother. I made a fool of myself. Because that’s what I always did. I told her I loved her. I asked her to come away with me and to hell with extra work, because that’s what I always did.
She ignored me for a few days and then left. Suddenly and without a word. For me anyway. Perhaps there really was more to it.

I told myself I couldn’t face going home to see himself. In reality I was feeling sorry for myself again and so I decided to stay where I could do most damage.
Very few people stay in a city like C for very long unless they can’t help it.
I had thought I was going to like it when I first moved down. Cocooned quite nicely thankyou in my little pink and white box in Halls.
Until, that is some crazy Scot and a dapper little fellow, just returned from Kathmandu broke down the door and got me thrown out.

That is when I got the above. It was straight from a kitchen sink drama. Something from a film of the sixties in black & white.
I tried to brighten the place up by painting all the walls white. They turned grey within a fortnight.
The colour, I discovered never mattered anyway. The walls were always blue. Dirty, grey moist blue and thin so I could hear the couple down the corridor shagging every night. Now that really pissed me off.

I had an Indian landlord who would come for his rent about midnight, with some Lurex, peroxide slag on his arm. Until that is, I got the Scot from Glasgow to stay for a couple of days when the rent was due.

I finally didn’t chance painting that Summer, not even in the blues. What I did do was go to see an entire season of Clint Eastwood films at the local fleapit. I wanted to gun everybody down on the way home.

I frequented the local Irish pub. The students frequented the back room of this pub all through the IRA bombing campaign of the seventies. We were convinced that most of the planning went on in the snug. The landlady can take a lot of the credit for keeping me alive that summer with her strong cheese and onion batches.

It was a mucky summer. I mean it really pissed it down. I watched it from my contoured bed when the bank wouldn’t let me extend my overdraft anymore and my landlady friend had gone off me.

Every weekend I tried to buy a large tin of beef broth and a bottle of milk. Have the tin on Saturday about the time the football results came on the radio and the rest on Sunday, around the Godspot on TV when every body was waiting for Songs of Praise to finish and the pubs to open.

This one particular weekend I had saved the princely sum of 99p, (by wrecking my only armchair to see what had been lost down it) because I was going out with the only one of my friends who had stayed at college with me, K.
I decided to risk going to the pub with 99p because I was meeting K and he knew of both a cheap disco and a party afterwards. Both of which we could gatecrash. We could have what he would call an adventurrrre.

K was short and exceptionally thin. He had long, lanky blond hair that was always greasy, a big nose, pock marked skin and false teeth. He was ugly. He habitually wore the jacket and waistcoat of a pinstriped suit, with tight dirty jeans and hobnailed boots that made his feet look huge.

He was a self-confessed lunatic who painted exquisitely detailed images of fairy tale castles and pink elephants. He also had a working psychedelic Dalek.

He and I first met when we were arrested inside a twelve foot paper mache penis with a bucket of whitewash and a stirrup pump. We seemed to find a fellow feeling inside the prick. This was during fresher’s week.

On this Saturday evening, we met in the pub and I scrounged a fiver off him. With this I paid off part of my slate and my conscience allowed me a couple of pints before it was off to the disco.

We got a Taxi from C to W where the disco was at the university. It had been cancelled.
Oh well we thought, always the party.

We found the party after a great deal of searching and it was very boring. Hardly worth the gate crashing.
No girls, no heinous chemicals and all the booze had gone from the kitchen table.
They also took an instant dislike to K. Chatting up both the host and his girlfriend didn’t help of course. Neither did smashing a window in spite.
The little shit who was holding this wake got a little worried over what his parents might say when they returned from Marbella.
We left after an hour. We moved to a club in the city centre. Things started to get a little blurry about then. K puked in a shop doorway and I had a whistle in my ears.

It was still raining when we left the club. The jock was a guy who later became a very famous black comedian. K had paid several more visits to the toilet.
We decided that he could stay with me, because it was the nearest, because of the rain and we could no longer afford a taxi. Not that it bothered us to do a runner, but we were going to two separate places and that always made cheating the driver out of his fare that much more difficult.

We arrived at my place steaming, in more ways than one. We both undressed and K went straight to bed. I sat up for a while, reading, giving myself a headache, listening to the guy next door seemingly coming constantly and trying my best to stop the room from spinning.

K had been in bed about an hour when he began to complain of pains in his chest. He first off suggested that I go for medical assistance. I think now that he knew more than he was letting on.
I told him to stop being stupid, he said he was being serious and would I please go and get a fucking Doctor.

Ok, I said, Christ and pulled on some still wet clothes to cross the ring road to the police station, reasoning that this was the best place to go for help. I then had to phone three nines from the bloody cop shop of all places because they were no help.

When I arrived back at the rat pit, K said he was feeling much better after a good fart and burp and he was sorry for all the trouble he was causing. I told him to piss off.

The ambulance I had called arrived and I explained what had happened. They though we were gay and had been having a little trouble with our bizarre perversions. They refused to take either K or us seriously.
About ten minutes after they left K said he was going to be sick. I jumped out of bed and helped him to the little kitchen unit sink. He slipped slowly and gracefully through my arms onto the floor near the hissing fire, shook once and was dead.

I hit him once as hard as I could on his breastbone. As I had done with my Father when he had his heart attack. It worked with my Father.
I massaged his chest. I tore his tongue from the back of his throat, along with a mass of puke. For some inexplicable reason I paused to place his false teeth in some tissue paper. Don’t ask me why. I breathed in his mouth; it stank of bad breath and cigarettes.
Nothing was working
In my underwear I ran to the flat next door. I think I knocked once before kicking the door in. The occupant was as usual nearing climax. I shouted something like get a fucking ambulance and ran back to continue my efforts.

The ambulance men pulled me off, God knows how long later. They placed a clear plastic mask over his face. It shone blue in the light.

At the hospital he was listed dead on arrival. I screamed in the empty waiting room. Let it all out I remember thinking.
Six policemen sitting around me in a circle interviewed me. The highlight of their evening.
They said they would have to search my place, for drugs, I presumed. They kept on calling me son and explaining that it was the inspector who insisted on all this and they were really on my side. Whatever all this and my side was.

At four o’clock they took me down to damp, green Victorian mortuary to identify what they thought was my lover’s body. We sat in a police car outside until I said I was ready. All I had to do was nod; there was no need to say anything.

For some reason, they had put a pillow over his face. There was a single sheet over his body and he was still wearing his dirty yellow underpants. He looked as if he had never been alive, this pale yellow puppet on a slab.

I didn’t go home until after the funeral. He was cremated in his hometown in Lancashire.

His Mother, although she didn’t know me or that I had been the last person to see her only son alive, hugged me throughout the service.

The coroner commended my action and said that when K died he had the body of a sixty-year-old man. He was twenty-one.
Oh, and my neighbour never spoke to me again.

I finally plucked up enough courage to go back to the flat once the new term had started. A friend came with me. On the floor near the fire, was a tissue. I picked it up and out fell K’s teeth.
The landlord had returned and stolen more books.