Cleantime

December 1980

It was two days before John Lennon was shot and killed in New York City. That evening, we had driven across London from Katie’s flat in Fulham to Greg’s in Kentish Town to pick up the children. They were both fast asleep, so I carried them to the car and strapped Emily into the backseat and Laura into her baby seat. Sarah said she wanted to drive, so I got in on the passenger side. It was a bleak winter’s night, and the roads were empty. I put a Bruce Springsteen cassette on the car stereo. We drove across the Westway, around the Hammersmith gyratory system and out along the Great West Road. When we reached the M4 motorway, all we could see were the beams from our own headlights illuminating the carriageway.

As Racing in the Street came on the stereo, I said, “Do you want a line of coke?”

Sarah nodded.

I turned on the interior light and took a hand mirror and razor blade from the glove compartment. I balanced the mirror on my knee, unfolded a shiny paper packet, fashioned from part of the cover of a Time Out magazine, extracted a small pile of cocaine with the blade, and chopped out two lines on the mirror. I rolled up a twenty-pound note, snorted one of the lines then held the mirror out towards Sarah. She took the note in her left hand, turned her head and looked down, glancing at the mirror.

As she leant over to snort the coke, she turned the steering wheel to the right, and the car slewed into the central reservation. There was a sound of scrunching metal as the offside wing made contact with the crash barrier and the car bounced back off it. Sarah lost control of the wheel and the car skidded towards the nearside lane. The tyres screeched as the car smashed through a fence and we plummeted headlong into the pitch blackness at the side of the road. The car rolled down an embankment and I felt momentarily weightless as it flipped over. My shoulders took the impact as the car landed on its roof, finally coming to rest upside down in the middle of a field.

I looked round to see Emily and Laura hanging upside down in their seatbelts. The passenger door had burst off its hinges, so I rolled straight out of the car and wrenched the back door open. Laura had woken from a deep sleep and was looking around, dazed but unharmed. Emily was trying to undo her own seatbelt. I helped her down and lowered her onto the inside of the upturned roof, then released Laura.

“Are the kids, okay?” asked Sarah, with a hysterical edge to her voice, as she clambered out of the drivers’ door.

I carried Laura round to the other side of the car, put her into Sarah’s arms, then scrambled back up the embankment. My legs were shaking as I hurried along the hard shoulder, looking for an emergency telephone. Once I got back to the car, I knew the police would soon arrive, so I scrabbled around in the dark, searching for the packet of coke until I found it. Twenty minutes later, a police car and a recovery vehicle appeared out of the darkness. Sarah told the police that a wild animal had run out on the road in front of the car, and she had skidded when she tried to avoid it. The wreckage of the car was hauled onto the back of the recovery vehicle, which took us on to Hillside Cottage.

I called the insurance company and organized a courtesy car, so I would be able to get to work during the week. We spent the rest of day at home, distracting Emily from the events of the previous night by allowing her to repeatedly rewind her Adventures of Winnie the Pooh video and consume the contents of a Cadburys selection box. Laura clung to Sarah’s legs as she went about the house. We said nothing more about the car crash, but the knowledge hung in the air like a putrid corpse on the gallows, as we pretended to ignore its stench.

The following morning, we were still in bed when I turned on the radio and heard the announcement that John Lennon had been shot. I started to say something about it to Sarah, but she leapt out of bed and glared at me.

“You’ve done it before.”

“What?” I said, although I knew what she meant.

“You’ve fucked Katie, hadn’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know what you’ve done. I can tell.”

With that, she left the room and slammed the door behind her.

~

We had been to London to do Christmas shopping and had taken Emily and Laura with us. We had arranged to meet Greg at the Hawley Arms, a Victorian pub underneath the Camden Road railway viaduct, frequented by traders from Camden market, where Greg had a stall selling ginseng and other imported Chinese goods. After a liquid lunch in the bustling pub, we wandered around the market looking for presents and I suggested to Sarah we should go over to Fulham and pay Katie a visit, in the knowledge there would be a party atmosphere there, as people scored before going out to nightclubs and concerts. Greg lived near the market, so we asked him if he would look after the children for a couple of hours.

It was about nine o’clock by the time we got to Fulham, and Katie was still in the kitchen cutting up dope for her customers. We went through to the living room. It was a long, low attic room, with a large dormer window giving out over the rooftops of the adjacent houses. Along the opposite wall was an L-shaped sofa, covered with cushions and throws, where Katie’s customers usually sat around getting stoned once they had scored. I skinned up a joint and Sarah chopped out some lines of coke. I knew Katie had a taste for Stolichnaya vodka, so I went down to the off-licence and bought a bottle for her and a half bottle of Courvoisier for me and Sarah. Once everyone else had gone, we were left in the flat on our own.

We drank, smoked dope and snorted coke, the three of us on the long sofa, Sarah sitting on my right and Katie to my left. Music pumped out of the stereo and swirled round the room as the drugs circulated in our veins. I put my arm around Sarah and kissed her gently on the lips. Katie leant in behind me and, as I felt her body heat, the sense of excitement in the room was palpable. The dope and booze and desire clouded any residual reservations I may have had, so I undid the buttons of Sarah’s dress then turned back towards Katie and stroked her hair. She snuggled into me as I helped Sarah remove her clothes, then Sarah rolled on top of me, as I drew Katie gently in towards us.

I kissed Katie as she started to undress, and she kissed Sarah. Eventually, Sarah was underneath me and my cock was inside her. While Sarah licked Katie’s nipples, I stroked the mound between Katie’s legs until my fingers felt her wetness. We continued fondling, fingering and fucking until we were all tangled up in a mass of sweaty flesh. Eventually, Katie’s body juddered as she came, I came inside Sarah, and we all settled back down on the sofa. We pulled a throw over ourselves and drifted off into a drugged and drunken haze. Sometime later, realizing that we had to get back to Greg’s, we snorted some more coke, finished off our drinks and got dressed.

We remained silent as we drove across London. At first, I felt the exhilaration of having crossed into dangerous new territory; my fantasies made flesh. As the buzz of excitement wore off, now tinged with apprehension, I knew there would be consequences, but I pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind.

~

On the way home from the office, I stopped for a couple of large brandies in a country pub. When I arrived back at the cottage, Sarah told me she had arranged a babysitter. She wanted us to go out so we could talk.

Outside it was cold, dark and raining. The trees at the roadside stood like rows of blackened skeletons along the damp embankment. We pulled into a pub car park. The interior light of the car was just enough to reflect highlights of flint on the pub wall. Outside, in the absence of illumination, nothing else could be seen.

Sarah wanted to know all the details about my previous experiences with Katie.

“Why did you do it?”

I had no answer.

“What was so good about sex with Katie?”

I didn’t want to answer.

“Did she give you blow jobs?”

I shook my head.

“Well?” she asked.

I had to say something.

“Yes.”

Sarah closed her eyes, then opened them again, slowly.

“What else? Did she let you fuck her up the arse?”

The windscreen wipers were still; the windows all steamed up. I smashed my hand against the cold, unflinching smoothness of the windscreen. I wanted to punch my way through the glass, but it didn’t budge. I felt the need to confess. I told her.

Sarah was angry, crying. I started crying too; frightened, remorseful.

“We could have done that too,” she said, her face softening. “It would only have hurt a little.”

I was overwhelmed by guilt; my breath caught in my throat. I could hear my own uncontrollable sobbing, like when I was a child. I knew this pain.

I imagined the trees outside blowing in the gale, like switches ready to beat me. I saw their uppermost branches whipping in the wind, like my father’s belt thrashing me when I was seven years old and had been strictly forbidden from leaving our part of Glasgow, but one of the neighbours had seen me and my friends running across the railway tracks between Govanhill and the Gorbals and reported it to my parents. My father had hung the belt up by the fireplace as a reminder.

I knew something was lost forever. I would never have another partner like Sarah. My relationship with her and the children had been shattered. We were no longer a unit. I would never regain her trust.

I set off to work the next day, my heart dragging behind me like a ball and chain. I had made an irreversible error. Halfway through the afternoon, I slipped out of the building down to the off-licence in the shopping precinct below, where I bought a half-bottle of brandy and a can of Coke. I took them upstairs and drank them in the toilet. The tension at home was excruciating. Sarah was distraught; I was devastated. Apart from talking about the children, a wall of silence solidified between us. This became the norm.

February 1992

My stomach lurches as the escalator reaches the height of its trajectory and deposits me on the concourse at Waterloo. The four-faced station clock shows it’s almost time for my train. It must be almost twenty years since I used to meet the gang under that clock on Saturdays.

As I check the noticeboard to find my platform, the last remaining commuters are arriving in dribs and drabs from the Home Counties; a woman in a beige raincoat and trainers carrying a shoulder bag, a man in a pinstripe suit unfurling an umbrella.

The train I board is almost empty; a few British Rail staff heading home after the nightshift, a young mixed-race couple cooing at a baby with red, gold and green beads in her hair, a building contractor with his papers spread out in front of him on the table, shouting into a mobile phone, arguing with somebody about a late delivery of concrete. I walk along the corridor looking for an empty carriage.

I was feeling a bit queasy when I woke up this morning so, not being sure how long the journey would take and wanting to be comfortable, I put on my favourite purple padded baseball jacket.

I find a seat by the window and settle down. I run my fingers through my hair to loosen it, then pull it back into a ponytail. By the time the train leaves the station, the rain has started again. We pass behind the tower blocks of Vauxhall, between the last remaining tenements at Battersea Park and the backs of terraced houses in Wandsworth. I have taken this route many times before, when I was a teenager on my way home to Winchester from football matches at Stamford Bridge or further afield.

1971 - Greasers

Arriving back in Winchester one Saturday night, the streets empty, the pubs full. Everyone who was going out already ensconced in their favourite bar. As I walked down the hill from the station in my cherry-red Dr Martens, I turned up the collar of my Crombie to hide my blue-and-white Chelsea scarf. Most of the locals were Southampton supporters. I knew the disco wasn’t on at the Teenage Centre that night, so I headed down towards the Bull, where the Winnall crew hung out. I wasn’t part of their gang, but I knew there would be decent music on the jukebox.

When I got to the bottom of the High Street and crossed the bridge over the river that separates the City from the Water Meadows, I saw two men in their early twenties with long hair and leather jackets walking towards me. They were ‘greasers’. Bikers without a bike. As they passed by, I ‘screwed’ them, trying to stare them down. One of them grabbed me around the neck, knocking my skimpy-brim trilby off my head. I was tall, but slightly-built; the greaser was bigger and stronger than me and probably five years older. He pinned my arms behind my back.

“Fucking skinhead,” he shouted into my ear, as his companion punched me in the stomach.

It took my breath away and I scrunched up. As I straightened up again, I kicked out at the greaser, who stepped back and punched me in the face. A sharp pain shot up to my temples, rattling my brain. I wrenched myself away from my captor and snatched my hat up off the pavement.

“I’ll fucking get you,” I shouted back at them, as I ran down the road with the metallic taste of blood between my teeth and cheek.

As I opened the door to the pub, The Upsetters’ Return of Django blasted out into the street. The bar was packed with sweaty, cropped-hair boys, wearing checked shirts and braces, jigging to the music. The Winnall skins may not have liked me very much, but they hated greasers even more. I told them I had just been jumped. Being happy for any excuse to get into a fight and exact a bit of revenge, Eddie and Phil, two of the older members of the gang, left the pub with me and we headed back towards the centre of town.

We spotted the greasers halfway along the High Street.

Trotting up behind them, Eddie shouted out, “Oi, mush!”

They turned around, but Eddie kept up the momentum, gesturing ‘come on’ with his hands, then pulled his elbow back as though to throw a punch. The greaser registered the fist, but was too late to block the boot that landed in his bollocks. He fell to the floor and Eddie kicked him in the stomach. The other greaser put his hands up in surrender, but Phil ignored his pleas and punched him in the face, knocking him back into a shop doorway, where he punched him a few more times for good measure. Honour satisfied; I followed them back to the pub.

Arrival

Once it has passed through Basingstoke, the train doesn’t take my familiar route South towards Winchester but continues Westward, straight on through the countryside. Looking out through the grimy, rain-streaked window, I notice the empty playground of a primary school and a group of schoolboys playing football on a muddy recreation ground, surrounded by leafless trees.

The train stops at a small local station, where I alight onto the platform, walk past the vacant ticket office out onto a lane, overgrown with weeds. The only other people to get off the train are a couple in their thirties. The girl, with red-dyed hair and wearing a long, black, lacy dress is staggering. She’s supported by a man who is missing a tooth at the front of his mouth. She asks me for a cigarette. I take a pack of Marlboro’s from my jacket pocket and hand her one. She puts it between her lips, and I offer to light it for her with my disposable lighter. As she leans towards the flame, I smell a sharp tang of alcoholic sweat. She’s swaying so much that I pass her the lighter before she sets her hair on fire.

She finally lights the cigarette and asks, “Are you going to Raynes Hall?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Do you want to share a taxi?”

There’s only one taxi outside the station, so there isn’t much choice.

“Okay.”

“Hey babe,” says the man in a croaky voice, as he gives her a hug, “I’ll be down to see you on Saturday.”

“You’d better,” she replies, sniffling, on the verge of tears.

I get into the front passenger seat and tell the driver where we’re going. The redhead gets into the back and within a couple of minutes starts to nod off, burps, wakes up for a moment then nods off again.

“You’re not going to be sick in the back of my cab, are you, love?” asks the driver, peering into his rear-view mirror.

She comes to.

“I’ll be okay,” she mutters, then nods off again.

The taxi driver looks at me accusingly.

“She’s not with me,” I say with a shrug.

The driver raises a sceptical eyebrow.

For the next twenty minutes we sit in silence, apart from the intermittent sound of snoring coming from the back seat. Our route takes us along winding country lanes until we turn through a pair of moss-covered gateposts, down a steep driveway to a gravel parking area outside a country mansion. When the engine stops, the redhead mumbles something under her breath then springs to life. The driver takes her by the elbow and helps her out while I carry her small red suitcase towards reception.

The receptionist makes a note of our names and tells us to take a seat in the covered atrium, next to the reception area. I sit on one side of a long, narrow ornamental pond, watching the lily pads floating on the surface of the water, while my travelling companion shuffles about restlessly on the opposite side. Two members of staff appear. One of them approaches me.

“Hi, I’m Darren,” he says. “Do you mind if I have a look in your bag? I need to make sure you don’t have any mood-altering substances with you.”

As he rummages around in my rucksack, there is a kerfuffle on the other side of the atrium.

“How am I supposed to keep my teeth clean?” screeches the redhead.

“You know you’re not allowed mouthwash,” says the other member of staff, holding up a toilet bag. Apparently, the redhead has been here before.

“You’ve got an appointment with the doctor,” says Darren, handing my rucksack back. “He’ll want to take your medical history.”

He escorts me along a corridor to the surgery. The doctor is sitting at his desk, typing on a computer keyboard. A nurse in white uniform and clogs is sitting in the corner with a notepad at the ready.

“Come in, take a seat,” says the doctor.

As I sit down, the nurse smiles at me reassuringly. The doctor turns towards me.

“So, then, what brings you here, young man?” he asks.

“I’ve been having panic attacks.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“The last couple of years.”

“Do they happen in the day or at night?”

“Mainly at night. Sometimes I wake up from disturbing dreams and feel like I’m going out of my mind.”

“When did they start?”

“The first time was five or six years ago, when I was living in Holland. One night, I dreamt I was turning into a small child. I could feel myself regressing, getting younger and younger until I became a baby then I didn’t exist anymore. I woke up in a panic, covered in sweat.”

“Have you been taking any medication?”

“I’ve had some Diazepam.”

“Your GP mentioned a drink and drug problem.”

“I don’t have a problem with drink and drugs.”

“So, why did he refer you here?”

“I’m desperate to stop the panic attacks. I’d do anything that would help.”

“Are you here privately?”

“No. I’m on the NHS.”

The nurse takes notes.

“How much alcohol do you drink?”

“A couple of cans of lager in the evening or a few pints when I go out.”

“Spirits?”

“A drop of rum once in a while and wine with meals sometimes.”

“What about recreational drugs?”

“I smoke cannabis.”

“How much?”

“A couple of joints a day, maybe.”

I probably smoke seven or eight joints a day, but now he’s asking, it seems like rather a lot.

“Do the panic attacks occur when you’ve been smoking cannabis?”

“Smoking dope and drinking used to help, but they don’t seem to work anymore.”

“What about hard drugs? Heroin, cocaine?”

“I haven’t had any of that sort of thing for years.”

“How long ago?”

“I don’t know. Six, seven years, maybe.”

“Did you ever inject?”

“No.”

Again, I don’t want to give the wrong impression.

“Have you ever had a prescription for methadone.”

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Your GP will have explained that you have to remain abstinent from all mood-altering substances while you’re here. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“When did you last use any drugs or alcohol.”

“I smoked some cannabis about a week ago. I thought I’d try and give up before I got here.”

“How did that go?”

“I seem to get the panic attacks whether I smoke or not.”

“Well, you’re in safe hands here. Over the next six weeks you’ll be expected to attend group therapy every morning. You’ll be allocated an individual counsellor, who’ll meet with you once a week. Do you have any questions for now?”

“No.”

“Darren will show you to your room.”

Darren leads me up a flight of stairs and along a corridor to the end.

“This is where you’ll be sleeping.”

It looks like a large hotel room, with four single divan beds, one in each corner. There are personal items on two of the bedside tables, toilet bags, photographs, notebooks, but the other occupants are nowhere to be seen. It reminds me of a dormitory. The last time I slept in a dorm, there were two rows of eight iron bedsteads. This is somewhat more luxurious.