I was about to turn 18, and I felt it was time to straighten myself out. The options were slim for somebody that had failed all their Highers, but I managed to find a college that would take me. I saw that there was an SNC Print Administration & Production Processes course. My mate got a job as a printer, and I thought I could maybe do that course and learn printing and start a T-shirt company, where I’d print stuff like those designer tops I used to wear and make a fortune.
But soon after starting the course I forgot all about ambition and just settled down into enjoying myself.
I fucking loved college.
I loved having something to do, somewhere to go. I loved not having to get a job, I loved getting free money and spending it on going to the student union and having a laugh. I just felt less inclined to go off the rails, now that I had a wee bit of routine and a purpose. I did it for five years. If you want to know what courses, I did that SNC, then an HNC Electronic Publishing, an HND Information & Media Technology, which took me into the third and final year of a BSc Multimedia Technology (an actual degree, regardless of what you might think), then a PgD Systems Analysis (or something). I felt like I was getting somewhere with my life, plus I was having a cracking time. I loved it.
Another thing I loved was getting to discover myself, as wanky as that sounds.
College had all these different types of people into different things. I’d look at the bands on their T-shirts and wonder what they were all about, if it was something I could get into. There was a guy who was into Morrissey, one of these fans that had the hair and clothes like him, even though this was 1992/93. He was good looking, sort of pretty. I kind of fancied him, and I didn’t really know what it meant – if I actually fancied him or if it was something else.
I started listening to The Smiths, who I’d never really listened to when they were around. All these songs about being sad and lonely clicked with me. I mean, I had pals, and I was going out having a laugh and taking acid and all that, and I was getting off with lassies. But there was something deep down that had always made me feel a bit apart from everybody, not able to express how I felt, and here were these songs about it. It was comforting to know I wasn’t alone.
Then came Suede in early 1993, during that first year of college, with more sexual stuff. The frontman, Brett Anderson, was quite feminine and was maybe bisexual, and I kind of fancied him. I just had all these new feelings. It’s not that I grew up in these macho surroundings that didn’t allow me to speak about it all; I just wasn’t around the sort of people that talked about things like that.
I wondered if I was maybe gay.
Was that why I was so fucked up in the head all these years? Was I in the closet and I didn’t know it? Is that the feeling I had bottled up inside? Was that why I liked watching Calamity Jane with my mum? Is that why I was stabbing footballs and headbutting shutters? Is that why I had fanny fright all these years?
Because, honestly, I had some amount of fanny fright.
I’ve not told you how many instances. All these times where a lassie appeared to want to take things further, and I didn’t, or couldn’t. Here are just three.
During fifth year, I was seeing a lassie from another school. We went back to mine, and we were getting off with each other in bed. She asked me, ‘Do you want me to take my bra off?’ I said no, you’re alright. She then told everybody I couldn’t get it up, and I got the nickname ‘Mr Soft’ for a bit. People would sing the ‘Mr Soft’ song from the Trebor Softmints advert.
During that same year I went back to a lassie’s house after a club, and we both had our underwear off to shag. I couldn’t get a hard-on. She touched my cock while it was shrivelled with the cold. Another nickname spread around school – ‘Needledick’.
During the first year of college I went back to the house of a lassie I’d been getting off with in Millport. We were in her bed, and she whispered, ‘I want to see you naked.’ I absolutely shat it. I got off with her for a while longer, then said that I was knackered and I slept on the couch.
I’d always wondered what the fuck was wrong with me. But if I was gay, that would explain it.
I had a girlfriend at the time, a lassie who was at another university, who I first met a year before in Millport. In Millport I’d given her a lick-out, the first I’d ever given. We then bumped into each other again and started going out. We got off with each other here and there, but I never tried anything else, not even another lick-out. I even stopped getting off with her, and we became more like pals.
She introduced me to some pals on her course, and one of them was a gay guy. I’d never really got to know a gay guy before, so I was interested in him, but I also liked him anyway. He had a sick sense of humour, like me.
When there was a group of us, I’d flirt with him. I’d talk about the possibility of me shagging him, or I’d give him sexy looks over my pint glass, and he’d say it was turning him on and all that. I liked it. I liked being sexual in that way, almost in a way that I couldn’t be with a lassie. And yet, I didn’t want to shag him. Not him, not any guy.
I fancied women. I thought about women. I wanked myself silly over women every single day. I had a big pile of porno mags that I’d bought from the all-night garage. I remember thinking that I was wanking too much, so ripped them up and put them in the bin. Then I ended up getting them out of the bin and sellotaping them together. That’s how much I fancied women. Yet I couldn’t face doing all the things with them that I wanted to do.
But why? Why not?
I think the reason why I couldn’t shag women was because I was straight.
You heard me.
I fancied women, I cared about women, I really cared what they thought about me. I don’t give a fuck about guys. I don’t give a fuck about what a guy thinks about me. I don’t care if I’m in a cubicle next to a guy and he hears me doing a shite. Whereas I’d care if it was a lassie, even one I’m not interested in. Maybe that’s sexist, fuck knows.
And there’s also that stuff from when I was wee, when I’d hear the boys saying bad things about lassies. It made me feel sorry for lassies, it made me want to protect them. I didn’t see them as equals, I saw them as fragile wee things. Fragile wee things with the power to destroy me with a wee comment or a rejection or something like that. There was just all this complicated nonsense in my head, and it’s a fucking turn-off.
There were only three lassies in my school years that I got my cock out with and tried to shag. Two of them were known shaggers, and the other one was cheating on her boyfriend. It helped me to know that I was just another shag to these lassies. It was almost like shagging a guy, if you know what I mean. But I still couldn’t get a hard-on, perhaps mostly out of stage fright more than fanny fright.
No, I wasn’t gay. Whatever was up with me, it wasn’t because I was in denial. I’d have to find some other explanation for being fucked up. A gay guy doesn’t sellotape together a ripped-up picture of Jo Guest for a wank, a gay guy doesn’t go brick hard at the sight of a fanny. Must be something else.
Right, forget about all that, let’s talk about eccies.
I took my first eccie when I was 19, on Saturday 20th August 1994, in a club/rave sort of place called Hangar 13. I know the date, because a guy died there that night. It was on the news and you can google it. He died from taking eccies.
The police queued everybody up outside afterwards and got their names and addresses, including mine, then they paid me a visit during the week. They asked me if I took drugs, and I said no. They asked me if I knew any dealers, and I said no. Then they showed me a picture of the guy that died, Andrew Stoddart, and asked me if I recognised him. I said no, and that time it was the truth. The police looked disappointed in me, then they left.
It was all over the papers that week. Andrew Stoddart and the dangers of ecstasy, how young people are dancing with death, how you could die from overheating, but also die from too much water. Or die some other way because of these pills.
The following Saturday, everybody was back in Hangar, and back at it. My first pill had just been a half, but this time I went up to a whole one, and I had an even better night. Other cunts were gubbing two, three, seven pills in a night.
I loved eccies. I’d never enjoyed dancing before, I’d always felt too self-conscious. They say ‘dance like nobody’s watching’, but I didn’t want to dance, whether I was being watched or not. But now it felt good to dance, and I actually wanted people to look at me, which was a fantastic new feeling. Before eccies, I used to like taking acid and going to the student unions, just sitting and staring at people, full of wonder – but it had run its course. The weirdness had become boring, and too introverted. Now I was jumping all over the place, and it was magic.
There was one time that wasn’t so magic, though. It was a nightmare.
We were in Glasgow, about to leave on the coach for Hangar, which was about an hour’s drive away in Ayr. A guy got on, selling pills, a shady-looking, stabber type of guy. I wanted a pill, but he looked the type to rip you off. I didn’t have any pills, though, so I asked him for one. Then I said something stupid. I said, ‘Are they any good?’
He looked pissed off, but he laughed. It was a bad-natured laugh, though, a mocking laugh, the type where he wasn’t smiling in his eyes. He looked to the folk around me, shaking his head, like ‘What’s this cunt all about?’ I said sorry, and got a pill. Then he sold my mates some pills as well, and fucked off.
The coach left for Hangar. After about an hour we arrived, and we all got off. There was a big queue outside. There normally was. A big hour-long queue in the freezing rain. And it was time for me to implement this wee idea I had.
You see, people would normally gub their pills in the queue. I’d done it before, but the problem was I’d sometimes be a mess by the time I got to the front, where the bouncers were. The pills back then made you ‘gouchy’ to begin with, meaning I’d be flopping about like I was on heroin. Plus the bouncers would ask people to take off their trainers for a search. I’d been keeling over, para as fuck that the bouncers would tell me to fuck off. Everybody was in that state, though. But I was para. I’ve always been para that I’ll be singled out. It was the same reason that I was too scared to smuggle the pills in. I’d be that one cunt that got caught. I’d be that one cunt out of everybody.
So here was my idea.
I’ve got this ability to hold something in my throat and then bring it back up later. I used to do it with coins. I’d let it slide down my throat a bit, then hold it there by tensing my throat a bit. I’m able to talk while I do it, and open my mouth to show nothing’s there. Then I lean over to turn my head upside down, and out the thing comes.
Well, I thought I’d do that with the eccie.
I’d have to cover it with something, though, because I didn’t want it to burn my throat, and that would be the same as just taking the pill anyway. But the covering couldn’t be cling film, because that wouldn’t dissolve in my belly. So I had the idea to put it in a chewing gum. I’d hold that in my throat until I was inside, or just swallow it when I got nearer the front, whatever I felt like.
So there we were, waiting in the queue. I chewed a chewing gum for a while, then I got my eccie out and put it inside. I didn’t put it in my throat right away, in case I accidentally swallowed it, so I just held it in my hand. It ended up turning as hard as a rock because of the cold and rain, but that made it easier to hold in my throat when the time came. I put it in my throat and walked right past the bouncers, saying ‘Cheers’ to them, with them unaware that I’d said ‘Cheers’ through an eccie in my throat. I felt so sneaky and clever.
When I got inside, my pals said they were gubbing their pills right away, so I just went ahead and swallowed mine.
About an hour passed, and I wasn’t feeling anything.
Then two.
My mates were bouncing about, and I was getting nothing. They asked me if I was alright, but I said I’d been fucking ripped off. That dealer cunt had ripped me off because I’d pissed him off. He’d given them good ones, but given me a shiter. I tried getting more pills in there, but I couldn’t get any. My night was fucking ruined. I was the only cunt in there that wasn’t pilled-up, and my mates had a right good laugh about it on the coach back to Glasgow.
I got home, brushed my fucking teeth, took off my fucking clothes and went to fucking bed. It was about 4 in the morning, and I went out like a light.
When I woke up, I woke up in a way that I’d never woken up before. I knew right away that something was strange.
Normally when you wake up, you’re half asleep. Your eyes open slowly, and they’re maybe all blurry. But my eyes just opened and everything was clear. They didn’t pop open with a fright, I don’t mean that. I’ll tell you what it was like. If you were to close your eyes right now for a second, then open them, wide awake as you are – it was like that.
I didn’t move. I didn’t move a muscle. I was completely still, lying in my bed, thinking about why I’d woken up like that. Did something wake me up? If I waited a moment, would I hear my mum or dad shout on me for a second time? I waited, but there was nothing.
I was lying in my bed, facing the left, facing the wall. I turned my body to face the right. And what happened next was what I could best describe as paranoid schizophrenia.
As I turned, all these voices filled my head. They were as loud and clear as if they were in the room.
They were the voices of other people, of people I knew, and people I didn’t know. There was music, from the night before, like a dozen techno tunes played at once. And these fucking voices. Talking. All talking at once. Laughing. All crystal-clear.
I’m not exaggerating when I say it was crystal-clear. I was fucking terrified. I’d never experienced anything like it, even all the times I took acid. When I took acid, I’d maybe hear a sound, a real sound, and think it sounded like something else. But this was coming from nothing. It was crystal-clear and right in my ears, as real as if I was back at Hangar.
Cunts were laughing. They were laughing at me.
I was lying there, frozen, not knowing what the fuck was going on. And I could hear them laughing at me. They were talking about me. My pals. Everycunt.
That guy from the coach, that dealer.
The dealer.
It was that dealer that did it.
The dealer gave me something. He gave me something and I don’t know what it is. It wasn’t an eccie, it was something else. I’m never going to recover. And he knows what it’s done to me. He knows that this is happening to me, and he’s laughing. They’re all laughing. They all knew about it. All my pals. They knew about it on the coach back, they know about it now, they’re all laughing at me.
That’s what was going on in my head.
It was relentless. Crystal-fucking-clear, like I had headphones on.
I thought to myself that I could never leave that room, ever. That’s what I thought. How the fuck can I leave my bedroom and see my mum and dad again? How could I go to college? I was a goner. I’d heard a rumour once about this lassie that was in a Flake advert, the one from the 80s or 90s where she’s eating a Flake in the bath; the rumour was that the actress took a dodgy pill and she went mental and she’s in a loony bin. I thought: that’s what’s happening to me. That’s where I’m going to end up.
I don’t know how I managed to begin to calm myself down, but I got the idea to take deep breaths.
My da had these Paul McKenna tapes that I’d listened to in the past, self-hypnosis tapes for relaxation and ‘Supreme Self-Confidence’. I think I just happened to take a deep breath and it made me feel slightly better, and I remembered the stuff from the tapes.
I began to breathe slowly and deeply. A big deep breath in, and then a slow breath out. A slow breath in, and a slow breath out.
It worked.
The sounds in my head started to fade away a bit, they faded back to how sounds in my head usually sounded. They sounded imaginary rather than fucking real.
It was too quiet in the room. I wanted a distraction. So I leaned over and stuck on the radio. It was ‘Put Yourself in My Place’ by Kylie Minogue.
I loved Kylie, and I loved that song. It was so nice. It sounded so nice. It was slow, it was nice, her voice was nice. I couldn’t have hoped for a better song. I was like, ‘Oh fuck, that’s better. That’s better.’
I was lying in bed, breathing deeply and listening to Kylie. I was feeling better. And it gave me enough time to wonder what the fuck was going on. And I worked out it was that chewing gum. The chewing gum got hard as fuck in the cold and rain in the queue, making it take ages to digest. The chewing gum eventually let the eccie out while I was sleeping. I came up on the pill in my sleep. That’s what it is. It’s just a normal pill. It was just a normal pill after all.
You’re going to be alright, mate. You’re going to be alright.
By about ten minutes later the voices had gone and I was simply eccied. I was simply eccied in my room. I felt good. What a fucking rollercoaster.
I phoned one of my mates to tell him the news, one of my mates who was at Hangar. It was about 7 in the morning, but I had to tell him. He wouldn’t believe it.
I gave him a phone and he answered it, knackered. I told him that I didn’t get sold a dud after all, it was all because of that chewing gum! I just came up! I’m eccied!
He was like, ‘Right. Good, good. It’s 7 in the morning,’ then we hung up.
I put on some techno. Not very loud, because I didnae want my mum and dad to know I was awake and want to speak to me. But it was loud enough for me to hear.
Then I started dancing.
I started dancing in the room myself at 7 in the morning, eccied, like something out of a sketch show. Dancing like nobody was watching.
My mum died when I was 20, when she was 52. It just came right out of the blue.
I should have seen it coming, because she’d been in and out of hospital for a few months; there was something up with her lungs or her kidneys. I didn’t pay much attention, I just assumed it was fuck all. My dad asked me to visit her at hospital once, but I couldn’t be arsed. She’d be out in a day or two, what’s the point in visiting? But I went along anyway. I remember being in her room and being a pain in the arse, playing with the telly or something. She called me a dickhead and said I should just leave. I must have been a right wee fanny.
Eventually, she came home again, and there was another long period of her being fine.
Then, one Friday morning, I came out of my bedroom to the sound of something happening. My dad was telling my mum that he was going to phone an ambulance. I looked at my mum’s bedroom and I could see her sitting up in bed with her hand on her chest, making this wheezing sound when she breathed in.
I thought she was at it. I thought she was exaggerating. It looked like somebody pretending to not be able to breathe, like she was acting.
But before I headed out the door, I asked my dad, ‘Is everything alright, anything I can do?’ It was more out of politeness than concern. He said it was fine and I could just go to college. So I left.
On the bus to college, I saw an ambulance whizzing past in the opposite direction with the siren on and the lights flashing. I thought about how it was for my mum, and how these people on the bus didn’t know it, they didn’t turn their heads to look. It was just another ambulance.
I thought about it in college, but not much. When I got back, I asked my dad how she was, and he said she wasn’t well. Obviously. So I was just like, ‘Right,’ and I went to my room to play on my computer. That was the Friday, and she was kept in over the weekend.
On Monday morning, as I was ready to walk out the door to go to college, my dad got a phone call. When he got off the phone, he said to me, ‘Son, that’s the hospital. It’s your mum. She’s not well.’
He was quiet and serious. I didn’t know what he meant exactly. I knew she wasn’t well, she’d been in hospital, but this was obviously something worse. But I knew she’d be fine. Maybe a part of me knew she wasn’t going to be fine, but I just said, ‘Right. Well, I need to go to college.’ And he said alright.
I thought about it in college. I was a bit tuned out, not really listening to conversations. Afterwards, I headed over to the student union for a few drinks with folk, but I decided to leave a bit earlier than usual.
When I got home, my dad walked out of the living room and into the hall to see me. He shut the living-room door behind him, but I saw that there were people in there. Something had happened.
My dad was that quiet and serious way he’d been that morning. He said, ‘Son. That’s, em … it’s your mum. Your mum died.’
I just nodded and said, ‘Right.’
I think I maybe asked what she died of, and it was something called pulmonary fibrosis.
And I was just like, ‘Right, I see.’
I didn’t feel any grief or shock. I didn’t really feel anything, all I could do was think, but I was thinking of nothing. It was like being hit with a logistical problem, one that freezes your mind for a moment. It was like how you would feel if you were planning some sort of event, and you had a last-minute problem, a big one; you’re not panicking, but the problem is so big that you can’t think for a few seconds. The cogs are spinning, but nothing is happening. It was like that.
I went into the living room, and there were seven or eight women, a few of them my aunties and one of them my nana (my mum’s mum). When she saw me, she went, ‘Oh, son!’ and gave me a cuddle. And the rest of them were the same. I can’t remember what anybody said, including me, but after a few minutes I said, ‘Well, I’m going to go to my room, if that’s alright.’ They all said that was fine.
I went to my room and just thought about it. I just thought about nothing. Then fell asleep.
I woke up, and for a moment I thought it hadn’t happened. Then I realised it had. Cards arrived from neighbours, ones that I’d never spoken to but I’d seen, and I thought that was nice. I spoke to my dad about when the funeral was and all that. I was asked if I wanted to see the body, but I said no, fuck that. That’s not how I wanted to remember my mum. My mum was full of life. And she still was, in my head.
At the funeral I was almost upbeat. The church was packed, because my mum knew a lot of people. She did a lot of stuff for folk with the community flat and everything, so I was happy to see that. It was like a celebration of her life, even though people were crying. And when we lowered her into her grave, I didn’t feel anything then either, nothing bad. I was just thinking, ‘Oh look, it’s snowing.’ It was January, and I think it was the first day it had snowed that winter.
At the reception afterwards I was all cheery. I was speaking to these old folk that knew my mum, and I was saying to them that there was no reason to be sad because she had a good life, she’d went to America and did all these things and she had a family and she was a laugh. One of these old guys was in tears at what I was saying, and I didn’t quite know why.
In the week or two that followed, I just wanted to get on with things, I wanted to get rid of my mum’s clothes as quickly as possible in case my dad flipped it and couldn’t let go. So I went about collecting stuff to chuck out. My dad didn’t object, neither did my brother. If they did want to keep something aside, they never said. For all I know, they did keep something. But I didn’t. I don’t like the idea of it. What if I kept a necklace of hers or something, then one day I lost it? I’d almost be more upset about losing that than losing my mum. It’d be like losing a memory.
I must sound like a fucking robot to you. But that’s just the way I’m wired. I didn’t feel sad. I never have felt sad about my mum dying.
The only thing that did make me feel sad was when I was tidying away her stuff and I looked in her purse, and in there was a receipt.
That got to me. I felt like I’d been winded.
It was an old-looking receipt, for who knows what. But she’d kept a hold of it, just in case. But now she was dead. She kept a hold of it, assuming that she might need it one day. It was important, it was worth holding onto. You make these plans, you have these things that you think are important, but they’re not.
That got to me. I haven’t felt sad about my mum dying, other than that. I don’t know if it’s the way she raised me or if I’ve got something up with me, but I haven’t felt sad about it all, other than that receipt.
I was taking it quite well, my mum dying. It was a bit uncomfortable seeing my mates for the first time since she died, or going into college with everybody knowing what had happened. They’d look at me differently, all serious and quiet, which wasn’t what I was used to. I just wanted to have a laugh about it all and carry on as normal. But when I got a drink in me, I started going on about her quite a bit, how much I loved her and how brilliant she was.
One night, I went a bit mental. I don’t know if it was anything to do with my mum, or if I just went a bit mental.
I was coming home from the student union, on the bus, and I was drunk. I was upstairs, and it was empty except for me up the front and these two guys down the back. And I didn’t like these guys.
I’d seen them about Carnwadric. It was actually one in particular that I’d seen about; he was the main one I had a problem with. The problem was that he looked a bit of a shady, a bit hard, but calm looking. He looked a bit like Al Pacino in Scarface, without the scowling.
The problem I had with him was that I liked how he looked. There was something cool about him, something attractive about him. He was a new face about Carnwadric. I didn’t know who he was. Who knows, I maybe just fancied him and I wanted him to notice me.
I heard the pair of them laughing about something, and I didn’t like it. It was like they were laughing at me.
I turned around and said, ‘What’s that?’, like I was hard.
They were like, ‘What?’
I said, ‘What you laughing at?’
They didn’t know what I was on about, but they laughed at me talking shite.
I started some kind of argument with them, about fuck knows what. But then I said, ‘Right, me and yous. The pair of yous. C’mon and we’ll get off this bus right now.’
They were like, ‘If you want.’
I stood up and went downstairs to get off the bus, and they followed me.
Can you fucking believe that?
We got off at a stop that wasn’t far from my house. It was near a graveyard, and I said, ‘Right, c’mon in here,’ and walked towards the graveyard. They followed.
I didn’t know what I thought was going to happen next. I basically just wanted to die. I wanted to get battered fuck out of me or killed, or I just wanted something to happen.
I walked inside the graveyard until we were all a good distance from the front gate. They were a bit behind me.
I saw a bottle near one of the gravestones. I picked it up and smashed it, and said to them, ‘C’mon then.’
They walked towards me. I pulled up my T-shirt and said, ‘Go! Stab me. Stab me,’ and I started cutting my belly with the bottle. I wasn’t gouging into it, I was just taking swipes so I was making cuts. I started crying, going, ‘Stab me. Go!’
The pair of them stopped walking and said, ‘You’re off your nut,’ then they walked away.
I hung about the graveyard for a bit, crying, then I went home.
I feel like I’m making it up when I tell you this story, because it sounds implausible. Why would two guys get off a bus to fight another guy? Why would they walk calmly over to a graveyard for a fight? I wasn’t a challenge, I wasn’t a giant. And I wasn’t rich. It wasn’t like they could mug me. I was just some drunken student, looking for attention, from a guy I sort of hated and sort of fancied.
Well, I got his attention. I got a reaction. You’ve got to give me that. He played right into my hands.
I wonder if he ever saw me on the telly after that, in Limmy’s Show. I wonder if he pointed at the telly and said, ‘That’s that cunt from that bus, that cunt in the graveyard, that one I told you about! The one that slashed himself!’
I wonder if he’s reading this book.
If so, hello!
It’s me!
Booze wasn’t good for my mind, as you’ve read.
I liked the good side. I liked how it took away my inhibitions and let me do things that I’d normally be too shy to do, especially when it came to lassies. But I didn’t like the dark side of it. I didn’t like what came after.
One Friday night I was at the Arches, this club in Glasgow, later in that year that my mum died. And I got off with a lassie there, a lassie I didn’t know. A ginger lassie. We arranged to meet the next day, for a drink. Fuck knows how we arranged it, because this was 1995 and I didn’t have a mobile. But we arranged to meet in the afternoon at a pub called Whistler’s Mother, on Byres Road.
I was hungover. Really hungover. I had the horrors, that terrible psychological type of hangover.
I got to Whistler’s Mother, and there she was. She didn’t look like how I remembered her, though. And when she talked I realised I couldn’t remember her voice, or remember talking to her the night before. It was definitely her, though. It wasn’t a case of mistaken identity. But I was pretending to remember her, I was pretending to know her. And that gave me the feeling that I was pretending to be somebody else. I didn’t feel like me. It felt like if I was to look in the mirror I wouldn’t see me, but somebody else.
It had a Twilight Zone feeling to it. And that didn’t help with the horrors.
We chatted for a while, but I started to feel not right in the head, because of where we were sitting. She had her back to the wall, and I was sitting opposite, facing this wall. I felt claustrophobic, because I couldn’t look around and let my eyes wander to the window or the furniture or a telly or other people. I felt locked in with her and this wall.
What made it worse was that we didn’t click. I think she liked me, but I wasn’t as interested. She was a warm person, a happy person, but quite a normal person, and I wasn’t that normal. I wasn’t that interested in what we were talking about. I wasn’t even interested in what I was talking about. But I didn’t let it show. I just pretended.
That wouldn’t have been a big deal usually – people pretend all the time – but there was something about this hangover. Something in my mind came apart. There was some kind of detachment.
When she went to the toilet and I was left with my thoughts, a horrible thought came into my head. It was like another personality in my mind, separate from my main one, and it told me it was going to do something bad to her.
It scared the fuck out of me.
It didn’t specify what it was going to do. It didn’t say it was going to do something sexual or hit her or kill her. It was less about the specifics and more about the intention. There was a will to do her harm.
I had to force it out my mind, like it wasn’t a part of me. I remember saying to it, in my head, ‘No! You leave her alone!’
It was like something out of a film. It was like Psycho. It was like a killer in a film with schizophrenia, the type of portrayal that would have mental health campaigners outraged at the harmful stereotype. Except this was real.
When she came back, the voice went away.
We chatted a bit more and had a few more drinks, and that made me feel better. Then we headed back to hers, some student accommodation place. When we got there, we turned off the light and started getting off with each other. We took off some of our clothes and got into bed, and we were kissing and doing this slow dry-riding.
But, as usual, I didn’t try to shag her. I just stopped what I was doing and pretended to be tired, then I went to sleep. The next morning, we listened to a bit of techno, she did a bit of dancing, then I left.
When I got into college on Monday, I told a pal about it, just the bit about us not shagging. I told him that I had no intention of seeing her again, so I didn’t want to ‘pump her and dump her’.
But he said, ‘Brian, it’s not like you’re just shagging her. She’s shagging you as well.’ Which was a good point. That stuck in my head, that. That was actually quite helpful.
I could have asked him if he also had any helpful advice about feeling an evil presence in your head that intended to hurt somebody, a presence that wasn’t just an intrusive thought but rather another personality in your mind as strong as your own, and you had to fight it off.
I didn’t, though.
But that thing about you and the lassie shagging each other. That helped.
I finally lost my virginity when I was 22.
I’d been close before. I’d had my floppy, fanny-frighted cock pushing up against fannies, sometimes going in by a centimetre or so. But I’d never put my full erect penis inside a fanny and moved back and forth. I never had a shag, until I was 22.
There was a lassie I met when I was in uni. She was in my course. We started spending time together and showing an interest in each other. I don’t know how that happened; maybe we all went out as a group in the student union one night, and we stayed out while everybody else went home.
We were quite different. She was a kind of bookworm type, a bit smart-arsey in a way that I liked. I considered myself to be clever, but she was more knowledgeable, and she’d correct me here and there, taking the piss. We’d talk about people in the course, talk about all sorts of things. We’d talk about our past, she’d open up about these bad things that had happened to her, and we’d talk about that, and I’d talk about my past or my private feelings about things, and we’d talk about that. I told her that I was a virgin, and all these hang-ups I had for years. We’d sit in pubs, getting to know each other, talking about bad things and good things. We’d talk about our evil sides and our vulnerable sides. We were both a bit damaged, I think, in different ways.
Then we got off with each other one night on our way to the train station. It was this passionate thing, because it had all been built up. We were pushing each other into shop shutters and grabbing onto the other one’s wrists, me grabbing her and her grabbing me. It was passionate, but also a laugh. We got off with each other a few more times over the next few weeks until we decided that we were officially going out.
Our first chance to shag came when we headed back to the flat of a guy on our course, a gay guy we sometimes hung about with. We went to this club called the Garage one night, and I asked him if we could head back to his, and he said alright. We went back, and he said he’d let us sleep in his room and he’d just kip on the couch in the living room.
As I was talking to him in the bedroom, my girlfriend went to the toilet for a minute. I said to the guy that I wanted to thank him for letting us stay, and I got off with him.
I just went for him.
We got off with each other for five seconds or so, tongues and everything. It was the first time I’d got off with a guy. I’d been wanting to know what it felt like, and it felt strange. It felt strange to have his stubble rubbing against my stubble. When we stopped, he looked a bit surprised. I said thanks, and he went away just as my girlfriend was coming back. (The three of us went out for a drink a week later, and he told her what happened, and we had a wee laugh about it.)
It turned out we couldn’t have a shag after all, because I didn’t have a johnny, and she wasn’t having that. It was good to be in bed in the nude with her, though. I don’t think we did much. I think we fell asleep quite quickly. The next morning, she got up and got ready, standing there naked in front of me with the light on. We’d had the light off the night before, so it was the first time I’d seen a naked woman right in front of me with the light on. I wasn’t quite ready to expose myself, so I waited until she went to the toilet to get ready.
A week or so later I invited her back to mine. I knew my dad wasn’t going to be in, so we could get up to stuff.
She brought along johnnies, and this baby oil type of stuff. I said I loved shiny, oily bodies, like I’d seen in pornos, so she brought some water-based baby-oil stuff that wouldn’t burn through the johnnies. We put all this oil over ourselves, with the lights on. I had a hard-on. It was the first time I’d had an exposed hard-on in front of a lassie. It was so liberating to be able to do that, and to find out that the sky didn’t fall and the lassie didn’t run away laughing or disgusted or something else.
We were wanking each other, then shagging. I didn’t realise a fanny felt that good. But we had to stop, because she said my cock was too big. It wasn’t too long – my hard-on isn’t the longest, I think it’s about five and a half inches. But she said it was too wide. It was bad that we had to stop, but a part of me was happy to hear it. For years I’d been wondering if my cock was too wee. I’d been in fear that it was laughably too wee. I told her that I was kind of happy to hear that, and she said congratulations.
So we just wanked each other. We faced each other, kneeling, hands all over, poking, pulling, squeezing. I put my finger up her arse, and she put her finger up mine. She hurt me, and it made us laugh.
Losing my virginity in that way was very special. If it had happened at one of those other times when I was younger, with those other lassies, I wouldn’t have complained. But having been so inhibited for so long, and then meeting somebody I cared about and loved and trusted, it meant something. It wasn’t just a shag. It was like we were actually making love. By doing this thing with our bodies – bodies that we usually covered up, a body that I was partially ashamed of – we were showing how much we loved each other. And by doing it, we loved each other more.
I had bits of her shite on my finger, and she had bits of mine on hers. It was real love.
Of course, we eventually broke up, about a year later.
I’d failed my postgraduate course thing, the one that she passed, and she continued to do her masters. I sat on my arse and did nothing. I’d been doing some multimedia stuff in college and uni, but I didn’t know how to get a job out of it. I sent some CVs out to companies, but I got fuck all back. So I didn’t bother.
Me and her stopped shagging, and she moved away down south for some training course with some company, and she never came back. She wrote a letter to say it was best that we just broke up, and I agreed.
I was skint and up to fuck all, and my self-confidence was low, so I applied for a job that didn’t ask too much of me. Data entry.
I saw it in the paper, and it looked perfect. I was a fast touch typer, so I knew I’d be good enough. I might not get the job if there were people much faster than me, but I could live with it, because it would be more of a criticism of my fingers than of me as a person. That’s the sort of fragile way I was at the time.
They got back to me and told me there would be an interview and typing test thing, which was fine by me. I got the train there, to some office building a few miles out. I had a suit on. I think it was the one I wore at my mum’s funeral.
When I got in, there were about twenty other applicants, waiting in a wee room. After a few minutes a woman came in and introduced herself as the person who would be interviewing us all. And she told us a bit about what the job would entail.
She said they did data entry for criminal records.
My heart sank.
I didn’t have any specific reason for feeling that way, but I just knew it couldn’t be a good thing. Just the mention of criminal records, in a job interview scenario, when you yourself have a criminal record. It wasn’t a good feeling.
She said that we’d be converting criminal record details from paper to digital. We’d be reading scans of paper documents on our monitors, and typing them into forms. The offices in Scotland did the records for down south, and the ones down south did the records for up here, so that it was less likely for anybody to see confidential information about somebody they knew.
That made me feel a bit better. You wouldn’t want your criminal record popping up on a colleague’s screen. You wouldn’t want the details of all this fucking mad shite you’ve done popping up, with people talking about you, as you’re wearing a suit and working hard to pretend that you’re normal.
But then she said, ‘Now. Due to the sensitive nature of the information, it means that we won’t be able to employ anyone who has a criminal record.’
Oh dear.
She said to everybody, ‘So, if that is the case, I do apologise, but I thought I’d mention that now, so that you don’t have to do the test.’ Then she said, ‘Does that apply to anyone here?’
What a thing to ask.
The room was quiet. About twenty of us in that room. Was I to stand up, walk to the door, open it and close it behind me? What a walk of shame that would be.
I sat there and said nothing. I even glanced around, to see if there were any criminals. Any horrible criminals. Oh, we don’t like them.
She said, ‘Good. Okay then, I’ll take you through for the test.’
We went through to another room with desks and computers, and we all sat down. She told us what to do, and gave us something like 20 minutes to type in some sample criminal records. I typed away, doing my best, all the while knowing that I wasn’t getting the job. There was no sneaky way of standing up and pretending to go to the toilet and just walking out the door, or fucking climbing out the toilet window. I just got on with it.
When the test was finished, she began calling people through for an interview in her office, one by one. I was hoping I was one of the first, so I could get out of there, but I ended up being one of the last. Each interview lasted about five minutes, so with about twenty people there I was waiting well over an hour. Sitting there. Wondering what I was going to say.
Eventually, she called me in, said hello, asked me to sit down and had a look at her screen to see how I did with my test.
She said, ‘Let me see. Here it is. Well, you did great. Very fast. That’s great, that’s great. So, the job would start … I mean, we still have to look at all the applicants, but you’re one of the fastest, so nothing to worry about there. The job would start around the …’
I just nodded, waiting for her to finish.
Then I said, ‘That’s brilliant. But, em, I wouldn’t be able to take the job, because of, you know, what you said earlier about the thingy, the criminal record thing. I’ve got a criminal, em, record.’
She said, ‘Oh right. Sorry to hear that. Well, you know, if it’s just something minor, if it’s just a speeding offence or something. No, in fact, I don’t think we could even take you with that, actually.’
I said, ‘No, it’s a bit more than that.’
‘Oh.’
I didn’t know what she was thinking I had done, but I didn’t want her thinking I was a sex offender or something. So I said, ‘It was car theft. When I was younger. I kind of went off the rails a bit.’
She said, ‘Oh right. Oh well. No, obviously we couldn’t take you on with that, sorry. Sorry about that, sorry to keep you waiting! Oh, you should have said.’
I said, ‘No, no, it would have been a bit embarrassing, hahaha.’
‘Yeah, haha.’
And I left.
I couldn’t even get a job as a typist. Fair enough, it was a job typing sensitive stuff, but who else would employ a criminal, given the chance? Is that really the sort of person you want locking up the office at night?
I just thought to myself, ‘You’ve fucked it, mate. You’ve absolutely fucked it.’
It was around that time, when I was 23, that I moved in with my mate. He was the gay one that I told you about, the one I used to flirt with, but we were over all that now. I moved in because I mentioned to him that I wasn’t getting on with my brother, who had moved back in to my dad’s house with us. So my pal suggested I could move in with him. There was a room free, now that his other mate had moved out.
It sounded like a brilliant idea. It was all paid for with housing benefit – that’s how my mate paid the rent. He just signed on and did nothing all day, just like me. We could have parties and get people over. And I’d just like being closer to one of my best mates. I’d go as far as to say I loved him. We’d hung about on a daily basis for years, we’d talked about all sorts of things, in person and over the phone. We actually used to chat on the phone back in those days.
There was just one thing.
I asked him if he still smoked, because I hated smoke. And he said he was in the process of stopping. He’d cut right down, and he was about to cut it out entirely. I said alright then, and moved in.
The flat was a bit of a tip. My room smelled of dampness, and it even had some sort of mushroom growing out of a vent behind the bed. But I didn’t care. It was my own flat. Me and my mate just sat about all day watching the telly, chatting. We had cable telly, which I didn’t have back at my dad’s. It only cost a tenner a month or something. I’d watch The Simpsons, VH1, Star Trek: Voyager, all sorts. Mind you, we had to watch it on my mate’s black and white telly, because that’s all we had. But you got used to it. It was a fucking lovely lifestyle.
The only downside was that my mate was still smoking.
We’d be watching some programme on the telly, and he’d light up. The living room would fill with his stinking smoke from this roll-up tobacco he got from Lidl. It got in your eyes and made your clothes minging. And see in that flat, all we had to wash our clothes was this ancient twin-tub thing, meaning it took about 24 hours to get your clothes washed and dried. But within a minute of him lighting up you were back to square one.
I wasn’t too bothered at the start, though, because we were still in our honeymoon period. And anyway, he wouldn’t be smoking for long. He said he was stopping.
But he never did.
I’d be getting up to open the living-room window, to let out the smoke. But then it got freezing. So he’d get up after his fag and close the window. But then he’d light up another, without opening it. So I’d have to get up. Over and over like that.
He got up to close the window once, and I said, ‘Listen, any chance you could just leave it open to let the smoke out?’
He laughed and said, ‘But it’s freezing!’
I said, ‘I know, but it’s the smoke. Listen, you said you were gonnae stop smoking, but you’re smoking all the time.’
He said, ‘I cannae stop. I’m a smoker.’ Then he laughed again.
That laugh went right fucking through me. He knew I’d moved in on the basis of him stopping smoking, and he just laughed it off. I sat there, quietly fucking raging.
We kept that up for weeks, the window thing, until we were barely speaking to each other. We’d maybe say something about whatever was on the telly, so we didn’t feel like we’d completely fallen out, but it was horrible.
One day we were in the living room and he was rolling up the next fag, and I said to him, ‘Here, any chance you could just smoke it in your room?’ His bedroom was connected directly to the living room, unlike most rooms where they’re connected to the hall. I asked him if he could just nip in, have his fag, nip out.
He said alright, and started doing it, thank fuck. It was much better.
He did that for about a week or two. He was hardly out of his room, that’s how much he was smoking. It was constant. Then one day he said, ‘Em … If I’m having to go to my room all the time, I’m gonnae want my telly. I’m not getting to watch the telly.’
I said, ‘Fine, on you go.’
He unplugged his telly and took it into his room, and shut the door. And I was left there staring at the wall. There was nothing I could say, really. If he’d taken the cable from the cable telly through, then I would have had something to say about paying for it, but he didn’t. It was just terrestrial.
And that was basically the end of our friendship.
He spent all his days in there, and I spent all my days in my room. I had a computer, so I’d play about on that. But this was before broadband. There was nothing to watch. No smartphones. I’d sleep all day and all night.
I did have other people in my life, though. At the start of me moving in, I was still going out with my girlfriend, the one I lost my virginity to, and I had mates that I’d sometimes meet up with. And I’d moan like fuck to them about the situation and how much I hated this cunt. I became obsessed. All I did was stay in the flat, day in, day out, just like him. I’d hear the telly in his room, I’d hear him laughing at whatever he was watching and whistling along to music stuff. Oh, I hated the cunt.
But then something good happened!
I was over at one of my mates’, and I saw that he had this wee portable telly that he never used. It was this wee thing that looked like a case for glasses, and when you opened it up there was a wee screen and speakers inside. It was a tiny wee screen, about two inches wide. But it was a colour screen!
I looked at the inputs for it, and there were video and audio inputs. I thought about the outputs for the cable telly box, and the cables that I had, and I thought, ‘Fucking yes. Yes!’
My mate said I could have it, and I couldn’t wait to get back to the flat. I wired it all up in the living room, and it fucking worked! I had myself a wee colour telly, with cable telly on it. Fucking yes!
I put it on top of the fireplace, which was quite low, just a bit higher than eye level when I was sitting, and I sat right up in front of it, within touching distance. You had to get that close to be able to see the thing.
I heard my flatmate’s bedroom door open behind me, and I could see his reflection on the screen. I could see him walking by and looking at this colour telly, with cable fucking telly on it. He didn’t say anything. We weren’t talking by that point; he just kept on walking to the kitchen to make his dinner. Then he walked back and forth to his room to get things, glancing at the telly as he went by.
Ha fucking ha, you cunt.
I wondered where he was going to eat his dinner, when it was made. He usually ate it in his room, but he used to eat it in the living room, before he took his telly away. So what would he choose this time? His own black and white terrestrial shiter, or my cable telly in full and glorious colour? I thought to myself, ‘Please sit down in here. Please sit down in here with it, and attempt to watch my telly. Please.’
And he fucking did.
He came back from the kitchen with his plate, and sat down on the couch behind me. I think The Simpsons was on, and I knew he liked The Simpsons.
I could see him in the reflection of the screen, where he was sitting. So what I did was I moved my head, to block his view.
Keep in mind that the screen was two inches wide. I just had to move a bit, and he saw nothing.
It was fucking wonderful.
I saw him move over a bit, to try and see around me. But I moved again, so he couldn’t see. Then I laughed, at The Simpsons. I laughed more than I usually would. I laughed, and we both knew I was actually laughing at him.
He stood up and went to his room.
That’s right, you fuck off.
You fuck off into your stinking fucking minging roll-up tobacco room with your pishy black and white telly to watch whatever shite is on ITV at 6 p.m., hahaha. Fuck off!
And then I eventually moved out.
We bumped into each other once or twice over the following few years, and each time there was growling and snide remarks. We fucking hated each other. It was more than just the telly thing. There were other things. That was just one of many examples.
One of the last times I saw him was when I bumped into him about five years after moving out, and a good while after the last snide encounter. I was in a pub after work, and he came up to me to say hello. I didn’t expect that, and I didn’t expect to see him wearing a suit.
He said he saw me come in. He said, ‘When I saw you, I thought ssssssss (he made a snake sound), but then I thought, och, grow up, go and say hello.’
It was very good to hear, and we shook hands. And then we talked about what we’d been up to and all that.
Then I mentioned the bad old days.
I said, ‘Christ, that was pretty bad how things ended up, wasn’t it?’
He said, ‘Aye. I hated you.’ Then he said all matter of factly, ‘I wanted you to die.’
I said to him, ‘I wanted you to die as well.’
There was a faint look of surprise on his face, like he always regarded himself as the goodie and me as the baddie.
But before we got into all that again, we finished up the conversation and said bye, with a friendly handshake, and that was it. It looked like that really was it, in terms of leaving it in the past.
Then I saw him one final time.
About a month later I was cycling home from the office. I was cycling through the toon, and as I was turning one corner I happened to see my old mate, my old flatmate. He was standing at the traffic lights, waiting to cross.
He saw me. And he saw that I saw him. But I wasn’t close enough to him yet to say hello.
As I passed him, I gave him a nod and said, ‘Alright?’
And you know what he did?
He just looked away.
How’s that for a twist ending?
That was almost a year I spent in that flat, doing nothing but going mental. Those truly were the Dee Dee years. Half of the Dee Dee sketches from Limmy’s Show came from the shite that was in my head at that time. I wasn’t smoking anything, I wasn’t drinking much, all I was doing was doing nothing. Sleeping, waking up, thinking, wondering, sleeping, doing nothing.
In the room I was staying, there was a poster above the door, a big poster of sunflowers. It wasn’t the painting by Van Gogh, it was a photo of two sunflowers in a field, and the two flower heads faced the camera. They were like two big eyes that filled the size of the poster.
One day, I looked at the poster, like I’d looked at it plenty of times before. But on this occasion something bad happened with my mind.
I suddenly became aware of an evil presence, in the sunflowers. It wasn’t like the evil presence I felt with that lassie; it didn’t speak to me in my mind. This time it was in the sunflowers. It only lasted a second, but it was a feeling that this poster was somehow evil, and alive. It wasn’t a hallucination. I didn’t see the flowers moving in the wind, nothing like that. I just felt that this thing here, this printed poster of sunflowers, was aware of me. That was a terrifying feeling. It was aware of me.
I don’t know if it was because they looked like eyes, I don’t think so. I think it was because the picture was just of these two sunflowers, side by side, looking at the camera. It wasn’t a picture of a single flower, or a field of them, or a vase holding a bunch of them. It was just these two, side by side. It didn’t look like something you’d take a picture of. It suddenly looked creepy, and I don’t know why. Maybe it was the symmetry, maybe they were like eyes, or maybe they just looked like the symmetry of most living things. Two eyes, two ears, two arms. It’s like my brain just thought of it as a living thing for a moment.
It scared the life out of me.
The fear of the poster only lasted for a second, but it was the aftermath that scared me more. It was the worry that I had even thought such a thought in the first place. It bounced about in my head like an echo.
I felt like I was going mad. Like, this was it.
This wasn’t an eccie in a chewing gum. This wasn’t a hangover. I hadn’t just woke up or anything. This was simply me going mad.
I can’t get across to you using words alone how scared I was. I’d always wondered if I was schizophrenic, if my mind was going to fracture and turn against itself, and here it was. I heard that it really kicked in when you got to your 20s, and here I was.
But then it passed.
I looked at the poster a few times for the next few minutes, to see if I would feel that fear again, to see if it would happen every time I saw the thing. But it didn’t. I looked at it a few times during the time I stayed there, to see if it would happen, but it didn’t. It never came back again.
I don’t know what the fuck that was. Maybe an overactive imagination. My mind likes to come up with lots of thoughts and ideas, whether or not they’re useful or make sense. I think that sort of thing can make you mental, depending on how severe it is and what kind of environment you’re in.
Fortunately, I managed to find a place to put my kind of mind to good use.