Linda Robertson - What Rhymes with Bastard?

LINDA ROBERTSON

For my mother

CONTENTS

Part One: The End Part One:

1 Me, Jack, and Me and Jack

2 Them and Us

3 Work

4 More Drugs

5 The Trouble with Mum and Dad

6 The Trouble with Everybody Els

Part Two: The Muddle

7 Jack Tries His Luck

8 Confessional

9 Finding a Man in a Haystack

10 Getting It – Finally

Part Three: More Endings

11 My Name Is Linda and I Am a Failure

12 Crazy for Love

13 The NHS Endurance Test

14 Pink Gold

Acknowledgements

Index

Hmm, let’s see . . .

Astard

Castard

Dastard

Eastard . . . no.

Fastard

Gastard

Hastard

I . . . no.

Jastard

Kastard

Lastard

Mastard . . . mastered? No.

Nastard

O . . . no.

Pastard – plastered? Plastered!

This is the story of how a very nice boyfriend became a Plastered

Bastard and how I wrote some songs about it.

Part One:

1: Me, Jack, and Me and Jack

‘ Don’t try and change anyone, Linda. I thought I could change your father. You can’t do it .’

Mum

Before everything turned to shit, Jack was my most successful project ever. He was nineteen when I met him, and as much of a mess as his bedroom. Instead of buying food, he spent his student grant on speed, acid, ecstasy and marijuana, surviving on nibbles ‘borrowed’ from the communal fridge. He always left a regretful note, gracious but with no mention of imminent replacement:

Dear John ,

I’m so sorry. I took your cheese .

Jack .

I started to collect them. I noticed he chain-smoked roll-ups, went to bed at nine a. m., and drew self-portraits in charcoal on his bedroom walls, incurring the wrath of the college authorities. A little crowd would gather in his room to witness his battles with the head cleaning lady: Brenda, screeching, hands on hips, Jack with his eyes still shut, making polite sounds from his bed. I found this endearing, but some of his strange practices were definitely negatives:

A tendency to recite Nietzsche in inappropriate social settings.

A disinclination to wash.

Going barefoot (which was OK in itself but incurred ridicule from my friends).

Walking with a chimpanzee-like stoop.

Holding his feet at right-angles.

Getting stoned to slow down and taking speed to speed up again.

Refusing to exercise or even walk on an incline

I considered this list, then I considered the positives: he was tall, handsome, gentle and sweet, and his ineptitude was charming. I knew a good fixer-upper when I saw one. With the maturity of a twenty-two-year-old I set about the repairs.

Five years later I had a fully functioning boyfriend, ensconced within a highly functional relationship, in which life tasks were assigned according to skill sets. Jack handled the higher issues, deciding which books and films were admirable, who was smart, what was right and – most importantly – what was wrong. I took care of the day-to-day stuff, selecting our clothes, furniture, housing, careers, friends and social activities. Household bills, naturally, were always in my name.

Thus far, my project had failed on only two fronts. The first of these was the inordinate amount of time Jack spent on writing projects. During a week-long holiday in 1998, he whiled away thirty-five documented hours writing a two-page letter to his best friend’s mum. Most of his spare time had been poured into a foot-high stack of works-in-progress. I had, admittedly, made some headway by turning him into a copywriter. Churning out text by the yard had increased his pace, but it was still a source of contention. My other failure was Jack’s smoking. He’d been at it for fifteen years and already had circulation problems – a large varicose vein had appeared in his crotch, coiling across his scrotum and up his cock like a power cable.

Achieving this tightly regulated relationship hadn’t been easy. About three months into our courtship, he went temporarily insane and had to be locked up. It was the Easter holidays, and I was stuck at Mum and Dad’s house, waiting for my new boyfriend to arrive from London. By the time he was eight hours late6, I gave up, dried my tears and went off to visit a friend in Southampton. Mum phoned us later that afternoon.

‘Hello, darling,’ she said. ‘I’ve just had a call from a girl who said she was ringing from a mental hospital in Woking. She said she was a fellow patient of your friend Jack’s. What should I do?’

The next day, I drove the hundred miles to the hospital, where I found my new boyfriend hopping round a traffic cone. ‘Hi, Bunny!’ Still hopping, he jiggled my shoulders. I asked him what had happened.

‘The pigs got me!’

‘How did they get you, Jack?’

‘Ha ha! They said, “You can do this the easy way or the hard way,” and I said, “The hard way!” So they beat me up, but it took three of them! Look!’ He showed me a nasty crop of bruises.

Later I pieced together the events: after taking the usual cocktail of speed, acid, dope and ecstasy, he had gone to London and begun a mystical quest for his dad, whom he had never met. He decided his philosophy professor was the most likely candidate, and wrote him a series of impassioned letters, hanging some on trees and posting others, which were later returned in a sealed envelope. He walked around naked in High Barnet, reciting from Ecce Homo , which promptly got him arrested and banned from the borough. 1That was where his friend lived, so now he had nowhere to stay. He

decided to build a raft and escape down the Thames, so he dumped his belongings in the tube station and made his way to Camden Lock, where he started throwing planks and branches into the canal, which wasn’t a river but would do at a pinch. He needed to steer his vessel and spotted an ideal-looking mop on top of a narrow-boat. He ran on board to fetch it, but the owner got upset and called the police.

Jack resisted arrest with the mop and was taken to the cells, where the police psychiatrist decided he was mad, and ordered him put away somewhere else. As all the local NHS wards were full, he was sent to a private hospital on the outskirts of Woking – Willowdell Hall – which took a very relaxed stance towards recovery, as the owners got £300 per patient per day from BUPA or the NHS. In return, they hung crap oil paintings on the walls, and made fancy food. (‘Good evening, Mr Stumford, will you have banoffee pie or peach melba tomorrow night?’) This last luxury was a bit of a waste, as most of the patients were anorexic.

On my second visit to Willowdell Hall, I met Jack’s mother. She was surprised by my loyalty – as her son didn’t seem like good boyfriend material, even to her. She told me how she had raised Jack on her own after having been abandoned by a rich American who had got her pregnant. After the drama of the birth, she’d fallen unconscious and then woke up in a hospital in America quite alone. Where was her baby? Dragging her drip behind her, she’d found him spreadeagled beneath a knife, moments away from circumcision. ‘Get your hands off my beautiful boy!’ she’d snarled, and snatched him back, then limped off to bed; next, she’d taken him back to Wales, where they’d lived with her sister’s family while she retrained as a nurse, working nights, studying by day and forswearing sleep and sex. It was there that Jack grew to manhood with his foreskin intact, surrounded by women, hens and puddles. And it was there, as the damp months turned slowly to years, that he grew a pair of size thirteen feet.