Laptop Blues

My sister called to say she’d found one for me.
It was a Toshiba Satellite in mint condition, so I swooped down to Newhaven to get it.
With a baby on the way, I couldn’t afford a new one.
The guy who was selling the laptop had found it under the stairs that his wife had mysteriously fallen down. She’d died from the fall and police were making enquiries, although he didn’t seem fazed.
According to my sister, this man’s wife was a massive alcoholic who’d bullied and abused him for years.
Her death meant he could live again.
He told me that she must have hidden it from him (she was always hiding his things, apparently). Having assumed that it had been stolen, he’d claimed for a new one on his insurance.
That was the reason for its sale and I was quick to buy it for £150.

That was nine years ago, and it’s been with me ever since.
At first, I was very possessive over it and always hid it when I went out.
It wasn’t the thing itself that I feared losing, but the words it stored inside. I needed to retain these words because I hoped that they would one day make me a star, and also because I’d lost a whole novel on a Psion (the back-up battery had run out).

When I got myself a USB key, the worry subsided, and, after finding a suitable hiding place for the key, I found that I could leave the laptop on its table when I left the house, at that time in Guildford.

Soon afterwards, we moved to France and, of course, the laptop came with.
I used it to make scraps of money on Betfair and wrote when time allowed.
My step-children and girlfriend used it to email friends in Blighty.
When things got hairy, I’d have to up stumps and find somewhere to crash, but the laptop always accompanied me.
I would estimate that we (the laptop and I) have stayed in about one hundred places together, utterly inseparable and the only thing of saleable value that hasn’t gone the way of everything else in a bid to keep up payments for my children.

The laptop that I write on in my little hostel room is, evidently, the only thing that has managed to stay with me throughout this time; the only constant in my very strange life.
That it’s an inanimate object without feeling probably explains why it’s stayed with me.
If it had feelings, it probably would have gone years ago. I suppose I’m a bit of a loner at heart.
Writing can do that if you’re not careful.

Towards the end of a tenancy in Putney, I was confronted at the door by a group of burly men from the Middle East posing as reps for the RSPCA.
They told me that cats were being found in dumpsters and asked if I could spare some time to answer their questionnaire, so I stupidly let them in.
I’d been working on the laptop in the living room, where they sat down and fired questions at me.
I had a sneaky suspicion that they were up to something, and those fears were allayed the next day when my Italian flatmate, a student, called in a state of shock to say the flat had been burgled. His new Sony Viao widescreen laptop and all of his cameras were gone.
When I got back, I saw that my laptop was still on the table.
My flatmate went back to Italy soon after, decrying England as hell on earth and vowing never to return.
I could hardly blame him. He’d been chased in the streets and mugged, beaten up in a pub, run over by two delivery mopeds and now this.

When I left Putney with nowhere to go, all that I had after the car boot sales was a bag with three sets of clothing, various photographs of the kids and my trusty laptop.
Dossing down at friends’ places became tiresome after a few months so, with no work on the ice-cold horizon, I went to stay at my mother’s empty flat near Guildford over Christmas.
Here, I was utterly penniless and snowed in, but at least I could write in relative peace.

In January, I drove back up to town and went to Wandsworth housing department for help. They eventually got me into the YMCA, where I’ve been for four months now.
In February, I sold the car to stop a court appearance for non-payment of council tax.

In this new environment, I’ve gone back to hiding the laptop when I go out, although I don’t know why.
If the Putney thieves hadn’t bothered with it, why should anyone else?
Apparently, it’s only worth £20 now.
Still, it’s what’s inside that counts.

When I get a flat, and God knows how I’ll do it, the laptop will be the only possession to have survived all those years.
The Duggie Fields prints, the cameras, the furniture, my artwork and everything else; gone.