Joel Golby - Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant

Mudlark

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by Mudlark 2019

SECOND EDITION

Text © Joel Golby 2019

Cover and chapter illustrations © Bill Bragg 2019

Cover layout design by Claire Ward © HarperCollins Publishers 2019

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Joel Golby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008265427

Ebook Edition © January 2020 ISBN: 9780008265434

Version 2019-12-16

This book is dedicated to Sacha Fernando,

who gave me an iPad once. This is the deal.

We are even now.

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

THINGS YOU ONLY KNOW IF BOTH YOUR PARENTS ARE DEAD

THE MURDERER WHO CAME TO TEA

TWITCH.TV

RIBS

LIST OF FEARS: A LIST

ADULT SIZE LARGE

24 STORIES FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE DESERT

SWOOSH

PCM (PER CALENDAR MONTH)

HOT SAUCE CAPITALISM

WAYNE ROONEY IS THE MAIN ANTAGONIST OF MY LIFE

THAT TIME I INVENTED SITTING DOWN

I HAVE THE MONOPOLY

HALLOWE’EN ’96

I WILL NEVER BE AS TOUGH AS PITBULL

THE TAO OF DOG PISS

WHY ROCKY IV IS THE GREATEST EVER ROCKY FILM AND THEREFORE BY EXTENSION THE GREATEST FILM IN HISTORY: AN IMAGINARY TED TALK

EYEMASK: A REVIEW

I WENT TO BARCELONA AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS HANDJOB FROM A SEX ROBOT

HEY: AM I A LEATHER JACKET GUY?

ALL THE FIGHTS I’VE LOST

AT HOME, IN THE RAIN

MOUSTACHE RIDER

RUNNING ALONGSIDE THE WAGON

FOOTNOTES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

My parents are dead and all I can think about is how to sell this house that they left behind. It’s me and my sister in a room without curtains – we had to take down the curtains to decorate, so the sunlight is pooling in, and nothing looks more naked than a house stripped and moved around when the person who lived in it died, and no more is that so than in the cold, white light of the day – and we are painting every wall in this fucking place white, because my mother went decoratively insane before she died and discovered the Dulux colour-match service and went absolutely ham on that thing. And we’ve had three separate estate agents come in, with blazers that bunch around the buttons and a clipboard or iPad, and a special laser tool to measure the size of every room, surveying the corpse with cool detachment and weighing each pound of flesh for gold, and they say – all of them, in turn – they say:

‘It’s going to be very hard,’ they say, ‘to sell a house with a pink kitchen.’ Which I admit is true.

My parents are dead and the kitchen is pink and the dining room, where she always used to sit, each morning, with a pale cup of tea and some cigarettes, is a sort of terracotta orange, with a gold line of paint stencilled around it at approximately head height. The front room is a looming maroon, a deep dark red the kind you haven’t seen since a Twin Peaks hell scene, and upstairs the spare room is brown with bronze swirls crawling up the wall in the vague approximation of a plant. The house was always her project: whenever I would go home, she would explain with extravagant hand gestures, not moving from that dining room chair, smoke spiralling through the air, what the hallway would look like when she was done, and what she’d really like to do with my room – now a spare room – and what to do with the spare room that wasn’t my room, if she had the money, and then ideally the garden, and then of course the kitchen, but—

And then she was dead and we had to paint over it all white to sell it.

My parents are dead and now I don’t know where to spend Christmas. Like, can I go to Dad’s? No. Dad’s is out because Dad now resides on a golf course in Wolverhampton, a golf course that has no official idea about this because when we sprinkled him – a grey, dreary day in February, the first of his birthdays without him – the family neglected entirely to go through any legitimate ash-sprinkling channels, which is why we had to take two cars and kind of sneak down this side road and park nearby, hop through thick grass on a hill, then crouch among thin, leafless trees, passing around the big ice cream tub that had Dad in it, sprinkling that, and so of course he went everywhere, big billowing clouds of Dad all around us, sticking to boots and trousers, clots of grey Dad on the ground. So: can’t go there.

Mum’s is out, because Mum is a slick of grey dust long since lost to the waves who was last seen poured into a shallow hole on a beach in Filey. This is another thing they never tell you about death: how, logistically, getting rid of two-and-a-half kilos of ground Mum is a nightmare. Firstly it is never in an urn: the crematorium always presents it to you in a practical-looking if grey-around-the-edges plastic tub, with a plastic bag inside it as a rudimentary spill insurance. Then you have to get the old band together again, i.e. get all of the family to one chosen place to reverently pour dust on the ground. My sister did the hard work of organising this one, getting my two cousins, aunt, my cousin’s two children and his dog, my cousin’s son’s girlfriend who I don’t think ever met my mum so why she’d want to come to a beach in Filey to dispose of her I don’t know but by then we really needed to up the numbers, a couple of Mum’s old friends and also me to a beach in eastern England, the sky so white it was grey, not a scrap of sun, not a scrap of it, and we spent two hours in Filey slowly walking down to the beach, digging a small hole, dumping the ashes, finding a bin for the ashes urn (someone had to carry that thing for half a mile, swear to god), then fish and chips and home. Trying to think if I had an emotion that day. Don’t think I had an emotion.

So anyway yeah: Christmas is tricky.

My parents are dead and my dad died when I was 15 and my mum followed suit ten years later. I had ‘completed the set’ by the age of 25, and they managed to split up somewhere in the midst of it, too: they never married but they argued like they had, separating when I was 13. ‘I am an orphan!’ I would say to people, as a joke, and they would go, ‘you’re not an orphan, don’t be sil—’ then realise that yes, actually, I am, and just because I’m not some grubby-faced Oliver -style orphan, flat cap and itchy tweed asking a man for oats, doesn’t mean I’m not an orphan. I’m an orphan. Look it up. I am the dictionary definition of an orphan.