‘Just… I’m sorry. I know this is…’ she stammered, looking uncomfortable. ‘But does it get better? The crying thing? Does it stop? Because this one’s been doing my head in.’
I smiled. ‘I used to think about chucking her out of a window,’ I said, tapping the handle of Lucy’s pushchair. ‘But I’m glad I didn’t. So maybe don’t do that.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think it would be so exhausting, is all.’
‘It gets better,’ I said. ‘Honest, it does. Plus you learn to look after yourself a bit better.’
She frowned at me when I said that, as if it was a whole new concept.
‘Sometimes you have to hand ’em over and walk away. Sometimes it’s the only thing you can do, so you don’t crack up.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ll try that then.’
‘It’s hard,’ I told her. ‘It’s really hard to hand them over, but not as hard as ending up in the loony bin. Or ending up in prison for murder.’
She smiled for the first time since opening the door. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘That helps.’
I waited a week before I phoned Directory Enquiries – they came up blank – and another before I wrote Billy a letter. It was a simple, friendly, utterly dishonest letter, saying I had his album, and I was impressed, and if ever he was in town it would be ‘cool’ to hang out ‘for old times’ sake’. I rewrote that letter twice, with and without the phrasefor old times’ sake. I could hear my own dishonesty in those words, but in the end I included them all the same. And then I copied the letter out again and sent both, one to his old address, and one care of Island Records in London, copying the address from the back of the CD.
It took a crazy amount of time – years in fact – for me to stop waiting for his reply to drop through our letter box, but in the end I did abandon hope. Eventually, I realised it would never come.
By then, I’d bought and discreetly listened to his’94 album,The Weight of Diamonds(leather trousers and a T-shirt) and 96’sDeath by Chocolate(the return of the satiny jumpsuit) – albums I hid in a drawer beneath all the old ones, which, in the interests of marital harmony, we pretended we no longer liked.
But in ’97, whenEars, Nose, Arsecame out (no picture of Billy at all!), I didn’t even get around to buying a copy. I thought the single was a bit rubbish, if I’m honest – there was something pretentious and self-conscious about it I didn’t like. I probably wasn’t being very objective, though. I was feeling pretty spurned by then.
But it seemed like time to move on anyway. The music on the radio suddenly sounded fresh and optimistic. And I – apparently like most of the country – decided that Billy belonged to the past.
* * *
Cool Britannia. That’s what the papers were calling it.Blair’s booming Britain.
We had a flourishing economy, the Millennium Dome and a high chance, some said, of hosting the Olympics; we had gleaming tower blocks (in London, at least) and the Eurostar; we had a new tax credit system splashing the cash to those who needed it most, and Blur, Radiohead and Coldplay; Britain was the place to be.
When we went up to London – a trip we took a few times a year to visit the wonderful and now free-to-enter museums – the wealth slapped us in the face. Angular skyscrapers were sprouting like mushrooms; rich men in suits climbed out of BMWs, Mercs and Rollers.
And yet Margate was going to the dogs. Nearby London’s obscene wealth only made Margate’s slide into poverty more unbearable.
The process was so gradual and had been going on for so long – since they invented cheap flights to Benidorm, really – that it took us a while to realise what was happening. But day by day, year by year, the place started to fall apart. The streets got dirtier and shops and pubs closed. I started to check the beach for syringes before I sat Lucy down.
BHS, M&S, Dixons, Woolworths… one by one they all shut down. With half the high street boarded up, the place started to look like The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’. Even Dreamland – briefly rebranded Bembom’s – went bust. An amusement arcade on the seafront caught fire and, because no one seemed to care, it was left that way, sooty, blackened, hollowed out.
Lucy’s schoolfriends started moving away, and one by one the houses they vacated became refugee ‘hotels’ – the most efficient way of extracting money from the state anyone in Margate had come up with. Buy a place and fill it with asylum seekers. Fill it with people who are too desperate to complain about the rotting walls and the mould, and get paid by the government for doing so. And once there were buildings filled with Somalians and Serbs and Croatians, what could be more normal than filling another one with Albanians fleeing the Kosovo war?
I didn’t resent these people in any way. I do just want to make that clear. In fact, my heart bled for them – they were fleeing wars, and misery, and famine. They were trying to stay alive, trying to build a new life, trying to protect their kids – and were even poorer than us.
But the refugee process was shot to pieces, and not even Tony seemed to care. There was no integration process to teach men with strange religions from the back of beyond that a woman in a skirt was not a prostitute. There was no attempt to ensure the houses were sanitary or safe, or even worth the money the government was paying. There didn’t seem to be much of an effort to teach them English either, and the law even stopped them from working. Enforced poverty and dependence for all.
So Cliftonville slowly filled with sad, unhealthy, traumatised communities who not only had little in common with the working-class population who remained – they didn’t much like each other either.
We got burgled.
It was normal, in a way, Mum said. Because who could possibly live on asylum seekers’ allowance? She’d just got involved in a charity helping refugees called Home from Home and was in the process of roping me in too.
Rob’s car got stolen, twice. My washing vanished off the clothes line.
‘If you’re stealing someone’s old undies,’ Mum said, ‘then it ain’t because you’re rich. It’s cos you can’t even afford to go to Primark.’ And I knew from the people I met at Home from Home that she was right. I’d seen grown men cry because I handed them some faded jeans. The security guard at Primark wouldn’t even let them in the door.
And then one day, as I was walking Lucy and Lou home from school, a man asked me how much it would be for a blow job. He had a lovely big dick, he said, winking at Lucy. I was so angry, I punched him in the face.
