thirty-one

Twenty-past-eight on a Saturday morning sometime in March, I was lying in my room in the house I'd shared with Stewy and his brother, Colin, since the end of January. More precisely, I was lying in the bed I'd been sharing with Debbie (on this particular occasion) since two o'clock that morning.

The bed, a well-sprung king-size, had come from a house clearance store in Westing market (an indoor market made up of a few larger junk-cum-antique shops divided by a corridor of smaller kiosk-style units specialising in china, books, silverware, old clothes, etc). The house clearance store was at the far end of the corridor; a narrow shop front which opened into a warehouse piled high with old furniture.

Although the base of the bed was old and worn (a disgusting dirty pea green - it's pattern long-since worn away) the mattress I'd bought with it had been quite new. Sometimes certain items of furniture are deliberately damaged by their owners prior to sale, exaggerating the extent to which they have been used, to increase their antique appeal and hence their value.

However, the all too authentic 'histories' with which most second-hand mattresses are 'impregnated' (encrusted stains that have soaked through the springs from one side to the other) do nothing to endear the potential purchaser. The fact that my chosen mattress was virtually free from any signs of such use made it greatly attractive and a real bargain - even with a price tag of thirty pounds, a tenner more than it's grubbier counterparts (or should I say counterpanes?)

It did seem slightly suspicious that a mattress of such little use should be offered for sale at such a knock down price. Perhaps, I conjectured, it had been bought for a bride jilted at the altar, the honeymoon - during which it was destined to be despoiled - having never arrived. Maybe it had been used by someone very large and alone, Tony had suggested (although the unbuckled, bounciness of the springs seemed to discount this theory). Most likely someone died in it, said Stewy. And he was probably right.

Death is like that - unexpected. You go out and buy a new bed and just as you're carrying the headboard across the road to your car, someone shouts out, 'Watch out for that bus!' 'What bus?' 'That bus.' Bang! And suddenly some surviving relative has a grim-faced policeman at the door and a brand new top of the range Slumberland five-by-seven for sale. That theory seemed to hold most water (although not as much as some of the older mattresses appeared to have done in their sundry-fluid soaked pasts.)

Thinking about it now, the mattress had undoubtedly been nicked, which would explain why the man in the antique-cum-junk shop had been so keen to get rid of it (and explain why he accepted my offer of twenty five pounds - the only time I have ever successfully haggled with anyone in my entire life).

The bed was the only thing that made my room habitable - an island of snugness in a cave of damp and crumbling brickwork. There's that line in a song about a cake being left out in the rain. That's what the house felt like when you woke up on a March morning - like a soggy cake (little wonder, then, that I was always a few minutes late for work).

The house had once been owned by the landlady (Mrs Banister)'s sister and appeared to have been decorated with the kind of figurines and pictures that are deliberately sold unseen at house clearance auctions (described as 'miscellaneous modern ornaments.') They were the sort of things that someone, having bid a pound for, would, back at home, disappointedly empty into the bin, comforting themselves that at least the box they came in was probably worth a couple of quid and might be handy for storing old tools in. Initially, I'd assumed that the house we rented had actually been decorated with the contents of just such a box. It wasn't until we went round to Mrs Bannister's house late in January to pay the telephone bill that I discovered that her house was decorated (presumably by choice) in exactly the same way (the house being aptly referred to by Stewy's brother as the 'museum of bad taste and tackiness, 1935 to the present day').

The ornaments which were in my room when I first moved in were probably the worst of the lot. Heaven only knows where they came from. We concluded in the end that they must have been produced by political prisoners in some barbaric dictatorship, as a form of punishment (paint this figurine or sit on that electrode, the choice is yours comrade dissident).

The resulting 'works of art,' we decided, could only have been sold through one of those tacky mail order catalogues you discover choking your doormat when you arrive home after being away for a couple of days, catalogues in which there is a microscopic note beneath every photograph saying - the reasonably tasteful, hand-crafted object shown here does not necessarily bear any resemblance to the piece of crap you will receive by overnight courier twenty-eight-days after your cheque for nine pounds and ninety-nine pence (including eight pounds package and postage) has cleared through our account and we have relocated to a post office box address in the Cayman Islands.

The first thing I did when I moved into my room - even before I'd unpacked or had a cup of tea - was to collect all the ornaments and pictures in the room and shove them into the bottom drawer of the wardrobe (where they remained - a 'Pandora's Box' of tastelessness that I never dared open - until the day I left the room, gingerly replacing them at arm's length as if the layer of dust they'd accumulated were radioactive.)

Although the ornaments were easy enough to remove, the problem of the room's wallpaper (a repeated 'medieval deer hunt' motif in various shades of diarrhoea brown) had proved harder to resolve. I'd covered large areas of the wall with posters (something which I'd been expressly forbidden to do by Mrs Bannister, in case it caused any damage - which seemed a bit like saying to a person with a badly broken fibula - don't wrap it in plaster, you might squash some of your leg hairs). However, as I lay there that morning looking up at Jimi Hendrix in a bright yellow shirt and a braided waist coat - snapped through a fish eye lens, his bulbous afro ballooning out at me, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell bending away one on each side of him, all flares and psychedelic Paisley - my attention was still, irritatingly but unavoidably, drawn to an archer in a shit-coloured tunic firing an arrow at the arse of a distant stag, it's teeth nibbling at a tree, on the far side of which stood another shit-coloured archer taking aim at another stag.

I shut my eyes and groaned loudly.

"How are you feeling?" asked Debbie.

"Great just great," I said rolling over, turning my back to her. My head throbbed and a sluggish sickness began to slide through my guts. I belched and immediately wished that I hadn't, as the dregs of that last lager and a dodgy prawn korma reacquainted themselves on my tongue.

It wasn't unusual for me to feel this way on a Saturday morning. Friday was prime drinking night, a night for reckless self-abuse, which I will doubtless regret in years to come when my aged innards reek some terrible revenge. However, at that time I was happy to slowly sleep it off each Saturday. Generally, I would lie there until about eleven, before eventually stumbling out of bed to the bathroom.

After I'd brushed my teeth, splashed cold water on my face and released a couple of long kept-in farts, I would rejoin Debbie between the sheets, pausing only to switch the telly on and readjust the aerial (knocked on to the floor as we'd staggered blearily through the early hours' gloom). I'd lie there propped up on pillows on the right side of the bed (the side nearest the window), my left arm round Debbie, a hand loosely cupping her left breast as we watched the mix of silly cartoons, inane pop videos and sensible advice that constitute Children's TV. Then, just as I'd be thinking of getting up, Debbie would (perhaps sensing my restlessness) lay her hand on my thigh signalling her willingness to succumb to my clumsy adolescent prods and fumblings, which by some time-honoured alchemy eventually transformed us into sweatily proficient and passionate lovers.

Such was the pattern of Saturday morning (which we followed as rigorously as others do their Sunday morning rituals of psalms and prayers). However that morning - as I reached over the edge of my bargain mattress, my dangling fingers searching for the hard chunk of wristwatch which I knew was buried somewhere in the soft mountain of clothes beside the bed - I regretfully reminded myself that there were to be no cartoons, no Debbie and no time for my body to repair the previous night's damage, before I got up.

On Thursday afternoon Mrs Barley had unexpectedly called me into her office and asked me whether I would like to do some overtime. Relieved that I was not being sacked (for taking one long lunch hour too many) I foolishly said yes. Mrs Barley explained that they needed to reorganise the main office to accommodate a new computer system that was to be delivered early the following week and wondered if I'd be able to come in at the weekend to help her and her husband shift tables and filing cabinets around.

"Would nine o'clock on Saturday be OK?" she'd asked.

"Yea, great just great," I'd said.

But as I listlessly retrieved my watch from the pile of clothes beside the bed and discovered that it was twenty-five past eight, I began to wish that I'd made some excuse.

"Saturday morning?...Now, let me think...Normally I would, but...I'm afraid I've promised to..."

It wasn't that I minded lending a helping hand. It wasn't like I'd have to spend all day at work or anything. It was just that Saturday mornings were Saturday mornings. As I lay there waiting for the hands on the watch to tick- tock round to half-past-eight, I began to feel rather resentful. I knew for a fact that neither Chris nor Angela had been called upon to help shift the office about, which seemed a bit unfair. I suppose that as a storeman-cum-delivery driver people somehow assumed that I was predisposed to moving heavy objects (as if I were somehow immune to the affects of gravity and didn't at all mind the endless back-straining, finger-blistering shifting of boxes that filled my working days).

Of course, there was a certain satisfaction to be gained in sharing with a burly, tattooed driver the task of emptying half a ton of boxes from the back of an eighteen wheeler, a certain pride to be enjoyed when one of the more attractive ladies I delivered to would ask me to loosen the lid on a particularly stubborn jar of coffee. But, getting up early to move a load of furniture was not something I would ideally choose to do on a Saturday morning, particularly not that Saturday.

It had been one of those weeks. We'd done a gig in Exeter on Wednesday night at a pub near the University. Charlie, who used to live next door to me, when I was still at home, had set it all up.

Charlie was in the second year of a History degree and had invited loads of his fellow students to come along. In addition, about twenty people had travelled down from Westing with us, packed into three cars and among the amps and drums in the back of the transit - an exuberant convoy snaking precariously down the many-cornered A303.

Although it hadn't looked very far on the map, it took us about two hours to get down to Exeter. And by the time we'd located the pub it was already full. The landlord who didn't seem in a particularly jovial mood, made us bring our gear in through the main entrance, which entailed negotiating an obstreperous obstacle course of inebriated students (i.e., a load of piss-heads who kept on getting in our way).

Eventually, having just about managed to squeeze our gear into a corner of the bar, we began to play. There'd been no possibility of doing a sound check as we were already running about an hour late, so we'd simply switched on, plugged in and hoped for the best. The sound was totally shit (much to Tony's dismay), but everyone was so pissed by then they thought we were great.

When we'd started our set the audience had stood a couple of yards back from us, forming a kind of carpeted proscenium. However, this gap had soon been swallowed up by drunken dancers. And by the end of the evening we were completely surrounded by people treading on our leads and spilling beer on our guitars (all except Tony, who had wisely retreated to an area of relative safety against the wall between the drums and the PA system). It was, as Stewy later reflected, 'a totally fucking mental night.'

After the gig we'd packed up then driven back to Charlie's house, where we stayed drinking and excitedly dissecting the performance until about half-two. By the time we'd got back to Westing and dropped everyone off it was almost four- thirty. With the post-gig adrenaline still pumping thickly through my veins, I hadn't found it too difficult to get up at half-seven on Thursday morning. Friday night I'd been a little late going into work, but hadn't felt too bad (at least, no worse than I normally felt on a Friday).

Even though we'd done the gig on Wednesday, we still met for our usual rehearsal on Friday evening. But we didn't do much playing. We spent most of the time chatting about the gig and the various girls Stewy had snogged, and drinking the couple of bottles of Pernod he'd appropriated from the back of the pub. It said 40 per cent proof on the bottle but tasted just like liquidized aniseed balls. I must have had about half a bottle. I felt great as we drove the half mile home in the van, glowing with oblivious self-satisfaction.