Now or Never, part 2

I didn’t get much sleep last night.
Once, after a particularly loud and angry door-slam, I pulled myself up from my bed and slammed my own door. There was a silence, a sly turn of lock and then, Crash!
It must have been the king of slammers, whoever he is.
No one knows the identity of the main culprit, such is his elusive power to drain and disease, but it’s starting to put distance between all of us now.
A few have started to slam their own doors over the last few days. If you can’t beat them (preferably to a pulp with a baseball bat), join them. The abused become the abuser.
When my alarm went off, I switched it onto to snooze, but then the slamming started up again.
With each slam, I shouted obscenities, which I’ve been holding myself back from up till now, and as I settled back down for a snooze, the buzzing noise, rather than receding, began to grow in my head.
I had become a part of the problem, so part of the problem was now mine.
Down in the canteen, I sat for breakfast quietly exploding inside, wondering whether the slammer was sitting across from me.
Having finally cracked, I found it impossible to contain the restless anger and so I secretly began to carry out a plan to uncover the king of slammers by denouncing his hideous plight. With people around me, he couldn’t very well strangle me.
Someone asked me how I was and I said I’d be fine if the fuckin’ door-slamming arsehole would stop being a cunt and shut the hell up and let me live in peace.
Malcolm, a wise old man from Jamaica, overheard me. He seemed surprised that I’d finally cracked.
‘I know,’ he said, ‘it’s bad, but I’ve managed to block it out from my mind.’ He tapped his temple as he said this. ‘I can’t hear a thing any more.’
A friend from the past had said the same sort of thing to me about noise, that all you had to do was ask God to ask them to stop making a racket and it would be suddenly go away.
It had worked for him so why hadn’t it worked for me?
I’d practised that little number hundreds of times but the slamming banged on regardless, worsening with every judder of my skull. Maybe God doesn’t bother with the YMCA’s problems any more. Maybe he’s seen through Christianity and given up on us altogether. It certainly seems so, and I wouldn’t blame him for a second.
Malcolm had tried to give to me the wisdom of his trained serenity, but I was in no mood to listen.
‘When I was on the sixth floor with all the youngsters playing loud music and having a laugh, I could handle it. I really could. I blocked it out quite happily, just like you say, because it was only music and laughter and they’re young and all that. But these door-slamming twats’ -(I looked around the canteen for any signs of unease from the residents, but nothing appeared out of the ordinary)- ‘aren’t the same. They’re doing it to make us feel their pain because they can’t handle it. It’s not the same as kids playing music. This is intentional disquiet to unhinge us and make us as angry as these fuckin’ twats are. The only reason they do it is to piss us off, not like the youngsters, who are just listening to music and trying to have a giggle.’
Jonno joined in. ‘I can feel the wall shake when they do it.’
‘That’s what I mean, they do it to piss us off. They know they can’t get kicked out for slamming their door so they get away with it. Fuckin’ twats, they are. Prize fuckin’ morons.’
Again, I looked around to see if anyone’s lip was quivering angrily.
After spilling my tea down my front, clearly shaken from the pent-up feelings of hatred that racked my mind, I went upstairs to my room.
Then the mixed-race loony who lives next door to me (not the one who wants to kill me) came up and gave his door the usual half-slam. His slam is bearable. I can live with his slam, but when he starts praying all night in his groaning, resonant Muslim drone, I have been known to drown out the noise with the use of the telly. Even all-night poker TV’s bliss compared to his wailing.
So here I am, sat at my desk writing this, planning my escape from the madness as I await the next big slam to shake my world and dislodge the photos of my daughters on the shelf above my bed so I can shout ‘fuck you, arsehole’.
I’ve cracked. It’s official.
A bit about myself; I was born under a wandering star so I went where it went. No, honestly, I’m here because I made myself homeless in a last-ditch attempt to carry on paying maintenance for my two beautiful daughters. The bills had piled high and when work dried up, I couldn’t afford to stay, so I kipped at various friends’ flats and repaid them by painting for them and buying the odd take-away and filling the fridge up. That lasted six months but I felt so awkward and shitty that I started sleeping in the Volvo instead.
Then, after only a week, some drunk hoodlums came and burst my tyres and smashed the windows with me inside. They couldn’t see me because I lay motionless, covered in the old dust-sheets that I used in the houses of the people I worked for, but they could see the condensation on the windows. That was all they needed to detect me as the vagrant I’d become.
I lay there until they’d done sufficient damage to my only otherwise saleable possession and gone off laughing like hyenas. Grateful to be alive, and in the middle of that winter night, I drove down to my mother’s flat in the freezing cold, rain pelting through the broken windscreen. Once there, I made out to sleep again till day break, and then sheepishly asked the tenants there if I could put my tools and things in Mum’s garage.
Mum’s tenants took pity on me and agreed, so with this done, I took the car to a scrap-heap and was given £50 for it.
Holding that note in my hand, I almost cried. The tax was worth more than that but he’d insisted on keeping it as part of the deal.
I knew that I couldn’t carry on paying the thousand a month for the children when I saw that note try and flutter away from my fingers in the wind.
No tools to hand, no wheels to transport them to the big houses I worked in as a painter and no work on the horizon meant that I’d finally got to the point I’d dreaded for months, if not years.
I called a friend and he let me stay. That night, he cooked up a nice meal and told me about a time when he’d been in the same predicament.
After losing the affections of his girlfriend, she’d booted him out of the flat he’d financed for six years without a penny.
‘The only difference between you now and me then,’ he’d said to me, ‘is that you’ve got kids to think about. We’d never had any, thank God.’
So he told me how he’d stayed at a YMCA and then saved enough to put down on a quiet little bedsit.
‘Staying there’s enough to make you see that the only person who’s going to get you out of there is yourself,’ he’d said.
He warned me about the nutters and all the other niggles that could see me kicked out, urging me to bite my lip and get on with it. He’s now a very happy road-sweeper and has been given his own local authority flat under the terms allowed to key workers. His girlfriend lives down the road from him. He likes it that way.
So I walked down to the housing department and did what he told me to do.
Two days later, after various heart-stopping moments shunted here and there, I was given a place.
I’ve been here five months now. During this time, I’ve found bits of work and managed to pay the princely sum of £1730 towards the children’s maintenance.
This being well below the cash amount agreed between me and my ex, she has now stopped me from seeing the children and advised their school to disallow me from seeing them there and receiving school reports.
By that time, I was on the dole so I sought legal aid and found a firm of lawyers to represent me.
In a fortnight from today, I will go to court to fight for parental responsibility. My ex has advised my lawyers that I am not of sound mind to take care of them. Also listed is my homelessness, my gambling, pot-smoking, my drinking, and my violent behaviour, not that I’ve ever hit her.
While she continues to poison the children against me, she has also contacted the National Domestic Violence Helpline and the local police to make them aware of my ‘hideous’ behaviour.
The last time I had a place to stay, I invited the children over to see my new abode, hoping that their seeing me in my own environment would negate the image of being a homeless alcoholic loser given by their mother. I cooked a nice meal for them and when I gave it to them, Beth asked if I’d poisoned it and Ali, my little three year old, burst into uncontrollable tears. That was six months ago.
I saw Beth, my oldest, about a month ago in the street and when I went to hug her, she walked away with her head in the air. I don’t blame her. She’s only eight. If I’d been brainwashed against my Dad at that age, I’d have acted in the same way.
No, all I want to do is correct the malaise that her mother has instilled so that my children can enjoy lthe rest of their childhood in all its beautiful innonence. Let’s face it; we’re a long time old.
So there you go, me in a nutshell, in a nuthouse. That’s why I want to get away from this country.
I know I can’t, and I’m sorry if I got your hopes up for a more congenial setting, but I need to get out of here and see my children again and get back on my feet and take them on holiday and be a good Dad. That’s all I want to do, so the mysterious sortie to Europe’s just going to have to wait, unless I’m deemed unfit to see them. That’s when I’ll crack beyond repair, in which case I will go. And you can come with me for the ride of a lifetime.
What was it old Socrates said before poisoning himself? ‘The difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness, for that runs faster than death.’
I saw a program last night that explained how the BP oil spillage came about as a result of (literally) ground-breaking oil-exploration by way of ‘deep sea drilling’. After seven years without trouble, they dropped their guard and used only six (and not the advised twenty-one) concrete stabilisers to stop the tunnel’s contraction. They also failed to weld leaks at its foundation with the BOP that had a dodgy battery. As a result, gases blew the tunnel wide open and now the leak is still unstoppable after sixty-four days of trying.
BP’s shares have halved in value, the coastline of south-east America is drenched in oil for decades to come, wildlife and fish are all but dead, and, worst of all, Mother Nature’s heart is losing blood at a rate of a million litres a day and counting.
All this for the sake of a measly buck or two.
When you think of the lessons to be learnt from Socrates, think cancer for the judgemental non-smoker, or the premature dementia of a banker, or the bloodbath that ensued from the sex-games-gone-wrong of an accountant, or the insane drug-taking of an abusive musician, or the heart attack of a fitness freak, or puncturing Mother Nature’s heart with a three-mile needle.
All of these psychosomatic ailments were brought on by unrighteousness, and I’m damned if I’m going to be misdiagnosed as a Bad Dad and told to go the same way. I’d rather go the Socrates way any day of the week. Just watch me! I’ll make it so much fun.
With that said, if you are a reader who is happy to live off the injustice of this modern life, you may end up following me to my end but, watch out, you may also find that your health deteriorates as a result, and I wouldn’t want you going before your time.