in the beginning

Even though I don't really believe in God, I do like churches. Sometimes when I'm driving in the van and I pass a nice church, if I'm not in too much of a hurry, I'll stop to take a look. There's something about sitting in the chilly, candled gloom of a church, something that makes me feel kind of sheltered, like some mouse hibernating at the back of a hole in a river bank as the water pours past.

When I was about seven, outside our house there was an old wooden bus shelter which I loved to hide in when it was raining. Sometimes, in a storm, I'd sneak out on purpose and just sit there, knees tucked under my chin, dodging the drips, braving the thunder, daring the lightning to strike me down. The way I felt in that bus shelter back then is quite similar to how I feel now when I sit alone in a deserted church - slipping about on a cushioned pew as I listen to New Order on my Walkman, cocooned by coloured glass and carved stone.

Sometimes, as I'm sat there, a vicar will mysteriously appear, casually straightening piles of hymn books or re-lighting candles. Normally when they seem me, vicars just smile with detached compassion, assuming I am contemplating some great grief upon which they have no wish to intrude. I bow my head and pretend to pray, notice new things about my trainers or study sequinned ducks and woolly wheat sheaves embroidered on kneelers, until eventually the vicars drift away. However, certain curates are more curious than others. I catch them out of the corner of my eye, sneaking a look from behind a stone column or peering over a font. Quite often, they'll watch me for a bit and then casually sidle over for a chat.

"If it would help to talk...," they say.

"I'm just looking...," I say, clicking off the Walkman. "You know, at the windows and all that."

"Oh, I see. You have an interest in architecture?"

"Yea, kind of."

"Come to admire our Georgian transept, no doubt."

"Oh, yea. Yea."

"It is a rather smashing example isn't it?"

"Smashing."

"Originally constructed in 1782. Though, as you can probably tell, the lower windows were replaced earlier this century."

"Aha."

"Of course, it's an ongoing battle."

"It must be."

"Still, we do have the restoration fund....You probably noticed the box on the way in."

"Oh, yea. Yea."

"So, maybe we will be seeing you on Sunday, then?"

"Possibly....well, to be honest....uhmm, probably not."

"Well, if you should change your mind, we're a friendly bunch. And if there is anything you feel it might help to talk about..."

"Yea, thanks."

I have tried to explain, occasionally, that I'm not actually a devout Christian, an architecture student, a suicidal schizophrenic or a repentant homosexual, and that I just like sitting in churches because I happen to think they're really cool places to look at. But a lot of these vicar types can't seem to get their head round that at all. I'm sure half of them think I'm a thief. The nice thing about vicars, though, is even if they do think you're after the church silver, they always smile politely and talk to you in a nice way. They see it as their duty, I guess, to be pleasant in the hope that they might help push you back onto the straight and narrow.

Actually, some vicars do get quite flustered when they see me. They shield themselves behind half-a-ton of antique bible or arm themselves with heavy bronze crosses, which they pretend to polish as they chat. And they look ever so relieved when I finally get embarrassed and go.

I can understand that reaction. I guess I do look a bit shifty, especially if I'm wearing one of my paint-spattered sweatshirts. But sometimes it occurs to me, if they talked less and listened more, they'd soon realise that I was harmless enough, and so save themselves a lot of time and worry (and probably a prayer or two as well).

I guess churches have trouble with people nicking stuff these days. I've noticed recently that they seem to be locked more often. It's a shame really. A few years ago people were in and out of churches all the time. Now it's only Sunday mornings, weddings, funerals, a carol service the week before Christmas and an occasional harvest festival for the local C of E infants and juniors.

Across the road from where my mum and dad live there used to be this nice little chapel. I'm not saying it was anything particularly special. But it was quite an interesting building with a gate and gargoyles and stained glass windows, the kind of place you think will be there forever. And then one day it was gone, just like that - knocked down to make way for an extension to the Toyota garage next door.

One moment there's this fine example of mid-Victorian architecture. The next moment there's this bloody great, glass-fronted showroom with an MR2, a couple of Corollas and a metallic green Carina E gleaming gleefully inside. I could hardly believe it.

A few months after they'd demolished that chapel, they built this new church up by Safeways, between the sports centre and the new community hall. It looked exactly the same as all the other buildings up there. I've only been in the church once when Nigel, this bloke I work with, got married. And honestly, if it weren't for the pews, you wouldn't know whether to sing hymns or play badminton. After the service I half expected them to shift the altar to one side and wheel in the buffet and disco. It's a shame.

One of the things I really like about old churches is the spires. I've always been a big fan of them, all those wonky slates and weather veins. If you turn your head to one side and squint a bit, some spires look a bit like the head of a lizard (and if you've got a good imagination you can pretend the weather vein is a bit of insect the lizard's just eaten, sticking out of it's mouth). Even if you've got no imagination at all, you have to admit that spires are the business. But, churches with towers can be pretty cool too.

About five miles outside Westing, on the back road to Exeter, there's a church out in the middle of nowhere, St John's, which has a massive bell tower with turrets and everything. It's more like a castle than a church.

The door to the tower - a massive slab of crumbling oak on thick black hinges - is always left open and you're allowed to go in (at least, no one's ever told me not to). The tower is very damp and dark inside with steps like stone cheese wedges, where you can mime medieval sword fights with shadow knights as you spiral up to a balcony beneath the bells. It's like heaven up there, especially in summer. I can spend hours leaning on the warm, lichened limestone, gazing down at my van parked beside a huge yew and rows of gravestones, which look (from above) like fossilised dominoes.

Opposite the church is a long, winding lane, which twists past cottages with crooked chimneys and little gardens, where kinky knickers and billowing sheets are pegged out between apple trees hung with tiny fruit and home-made swings. Along the lane, hedges flutter with swarms of small brown birds, and the breeze-borne shrieks of cruising crows cut across cabbage fields, muddy munching cows and the motorway's distant time-hungry roar....It's heaven. It really is.

Quite often, after I've been up the tower at St John's, I go and have a quick look in the graveyard. Up until a couple of summers ago it used to be quite carefully looked after, with plenty of fresh flowers everywhere and Wembley cup-final grass between strimmed headstone edges. But since then the church gardener must have retired or something because now it's all overgrown with angels covered in brambles winging their way forlornly through giant nettles.

Despite it's recent demise, the graveyard is still an interesting place to look around. There's something about it, something strangely compelling, that always makes me want to wander in and run my fingers slowly over all that moss-softened gothic masonry.

I don't think I'd like to be buried in a graveyard, though. I'd rather be cremated and have my ashes scattered in the centre circle at Upton Park or something. Yea, I'd rather much rather be turned into fertiliser for a few blades of grass on a football pitch than lie there in a box slowly feeding a load of horrible worms. But, having said that, I wouldn't mind my own gravestone.

I like looking at all those old gravestones. You know, the really old ones - worn eulogies to a mother of eleven, who died of confumption in 1693 and had a husband called Seth, buried beside later that same year. You might not think it, but gravestones can actually be quite fascinating, and I often have a good read of them when I'm doing a painting of a church.

I've always been heavily into artists like Cezanne, Chagall and Van Gough, so my pictures tend to be kind of impressionist in style. They don't always turn out too well. But at least you can tell what they're supposed to be (which is more than you can say for some artists).

Now, I'm pretty open-minded about lots of things. But if there's one thing I cannot stand it's so-called abstract art. It really annoys me. It's not that I don't understand the concept of it. It's just that I think it's a load of pretentious old wank.

They have these things now, which are supposed to be sculptures or something. Hideous lumps of concrete and crudely welded iron carcasses created for vast sums of money by some talentless twat in a Warhol polo neck or some posh, old bitch in a boiler suit. They have an annoying habit of putting these piles of crap in derelict car parks between condemned high rise blocks and then having the audacity to call them public art.

As if, when you've got two inch chipboard for windows and a load of smackheads living next door, some huge and meaningless twisted metal mutation in the middle of a desolate, concrete concourse, seventeen stories below, is going to make you forget that you haven't worked for five years and recently contracted dysentery from a cracked sewage pipe. It's totally fucking crazy. It really is.

The way I see it, churches are the only true public art there is. They were built by people for other people. They are open to anyone, regardless of who they are or what they are or where they come from. You may or may not believe there's some kind of omnipotent being sitting on a cloud somewhere in outer space patiently listening to your prayers. However you can't deny that, from an artistic point of view, churches, with all their glass and angels, shadows and sadness, are the real thing.

II

Of course, when I say that I like churches from an artistic point of view I wouldn't want to give you the impression that I know much about art or anything, because I don't. Don't get me wrong. I am interested in art. In fact, I might even go so far as to say I'm an art fanatic. But, I'm not what you'd call a proper artist. Put it this way. If you just happened to see me sitting there in a church one day in my T-shirt, baggy jeans and trainers, plucking up the courage to start sketching a fifteenth century mausoleum, you wouldn't think to yourself, 'Oh yes, he's an artist,' or anything. No, you'd be more likely to think, 'What the hell is that scruffy git doing in here?'

If I told the blokes I work with that I was an artist, I know exactly how they'd react. They would just laugh and say, 'You? An artist? More like a bloody piss artist!', because I do like a drink. Actually, I have been trying to cut down on the lager because I've got a bit of a beer belly coming on. If I relax my stomach muscles, it looks as if I'm pregnant.

My mates have nicknamed the contents of my beer belly, Stella, because that's what I drink, Stella Artois. They prod my guts and say, 'Cor, she must be nearly due now,' or, 'Christ, it looks like twins,' and stuff like that. That's the trouble you see. I'm such an unfashionable slob, no one would ever take me seriously if I tried to be a real artist. I just don't look the part.

I saw this programme on telly once about this Scottish painter. He was only my age, I guess, but he was already fairly famous and lived and worked in this massive warehouse up near Glasgow. There was no furniture in the warehouse, just a huge canvas, a pair of step ladders, a sleeping bag and a kettle. It was an electric kettle, but the switch was broken so the bloke heated it up on a small Primus stove, which like everything else in the place (including the artist himself) was totally covered in paint.

There was paint spattered all over the artists's hands and the numerous rings on his fingers. It covered his baggy old dungarees and his trendy Adidas sweatshirt. His hair hung down to his shoulders and kept on dipping in his palette. And paint dripped from the side of his nose like Technicolor snot. In fact, you would have to go a very, very long way to find anyone who looked more like an artist than that Scottish bloke did. And he had the temperament to go with it.

The first half of the programme showed how the artist created his picture. It started off as a formal portrait of a sad woman sitting on a bed but, for no obvious reason, ended up as a surreal scene of a punk angel with pink hair and pierced nipples picking apples from these trees which grew upside down from clouds of smoke.

The smoke was coming out of the back of an oven the size of a small factory where a lot of very round people dressed in grey suits and a variety of different hats were queuing up for a slice of a huge apple pie. It was all very weird.

The second half of the programme (after the adverts) explained how his agent, some snooty cow in a trouser suit, marketed the picture and how it appeared in an exhibition and then finally ended up on the boardroom wall in the head office of some Japanese supermarket chain in Yokohama (which had just started to import some new kind of red apple from New Zealand).

The programme was shot over several months. And all that time it didn't look as if that artist bloke had washed his hair once. He didn't seem bothered what he looked like. In fact, he didn't seem too bothered about anything except his pictures. After the picture of the punk angel had been sold for a few thousand dollars or yen or whatever, his agent was leaping about as if she were on a fucking trampoline. She rang the artist to tell him his good fortune. But he acted like he couldn't care less.

The first time the agent rang, this artist bloke was up his step ladder and, because he was in the middle of a tricky bit of painting, he wouldn't go and answer the phone. The camera panned back to show this kind of comedy shot of the reporter who was making the documentary, half-way up the ladder trying to persuade the artist to come down. But the artist just kept on flicking paint down at the reporter and shouting get the beep off my beeping ladder you beeping beep.

In the end, the agent rang off and they had to shoot the whole scene again. The reporter wasn't very amused by it all (but he was a bit of an irritating pratt and I don't think I would have come down the ladder just because he'd told me to). Anyway, eventually this agent rang back from New York or Hong Kong or wherever and they finally persuaded the artist to stop painting and go and speak to her.

"Eighteen thousand dollars," said the agent. "Isn't it simply marvellous?"

"Yea," said the artist. "Now I can buy a new kettle."

Then he hung up without even saying good-bye and went back up his step ladder to continue painting. The irritating reporter who was making the documentary said, "Eighteen thousand dollars! Aren't you going to buy anything else?"

And the artist said, "Yea, I might get some more tea bags."

I thought to myself, yea and whilst you're at it do yourself a favour mate and get some flipping shampoo (although, he'd have had to mix it with a load of white spirit to get all that bloody paint out of his hair, I can tell you).

Personally, I can't stand greasy hair. My hair's cropped dead short. I generally have a number two cut up the sides and about three inches at most left on top. My hair's kind of dark brown and spiky, if you can picture that. It's always the same girl, Vicky, that cuts it now. She's a friend of my sister's. It would be cheaper, I guess, to get my hair done at Frank's place. Frank has got one of those little sit and wait barber shops where you can get a short back and sides for three fifty. He's a nice enough bloke, but he's ex-navy and can go a bit mad with the old shears sometimes and give you a kind of marine crew cut. Vicky knows the style I like (besides which she's got really nice breasts which kind of rub against you in a very warm and pleasant way as she reaches over to trim above your ears). So, I stick with her.

Even though I'm into art and everything, I've never really been an arty kind of person. I just wear normal, boring kind of clothes. You know, short-sleeved T-shirts with button-up collars, baggy Levis and trainers. I had a really nice pair of Reebok HXLs but the sole came away on my right foot when I was playing five-a-side, so I got some Pumas instead. They were a bit pricey, but dead comfortable. I keep the Reeboks for work now.

When I was at school, which is a few years back now (although sometimes it doesn't seem that long ago), there used to be these people in art class who had that kind of gothic look. They wore black blouses and bangles and tin skull rings, really thick eyeliner and black lipstick, crucifix earrings and kind of pointed boots with thick heels and big buckles (and that was just the boys - ha, ha, ha).

There was another little clique of kids who seemed to change their look every term. I can't remember what the fashions were back then, but whatever it happened to be they were always into it. They always had the right kind of shoes and jackets and stuff. I'm not saying that they didn't look good, because they did. In fact, a couple of them looked liked they'd just walked out of The Face or i-D (or whatever the fashionable magazine was in those days). But, what got me was that they thought, because they had the right brand of trousers on and had read a couple of poems by Baudelaire in their French class, they were automatically going to be wonderful artists.

Now, I'm not just putting those kids down because they were good looking and trendy and all that, but honestly most of them couldn't draw for toffee. I admit, a couple of them were really, really good, miles better then me. But, the rest of them - well, to be frank, they were complete shit. And they just couldn't see it.

I used to have this art teacher, Miss Thomas, who was dead nice. She told me I had a real gift and it would be a sin to waste it. She was kind of religious, Miss Thomas. I know that because she went to church near us. I used to bump into her sometimes on a Sunday morning when I was on my way to the park to play left midfield for Crayford Hill Cyclones (or Crayford Hill Psychos as we were popularly - or rather, unpopularly - known) in the under seventeen's league.

Most of the teachers used to live out in the country or in the old Victorian houses up by the College. However, Miss Thomas only worked part time and didn't earn that much money, so she lived round our way, which probably partly explains why she was a bit more friendly to me than the rest of them. Miss Thomas would probably be pretty angry with me now if she knew I was just an ordinary painter, painting hoardings and occasionally artexing a ceiling (which isn't as easy as it looks but isn't the same as the kind of painting she envisaged me doing, that's for sure).

Miss Thomas wanted me to go to college. She kept on telling me I had to concentrate on technique, because I used to paint in a kind of cartoon style, which drove her mad. 'Everything has to be couched in reality', she used to say, 'Everything has to be couched in reality'. That was her favourite phrase - couched in reality.

She was always going on at me to stop mucking about and concentrate on drawing stuff properly. But I wasn't particularly interested in the kind of things she insisted we had to draw; things like still lifes of fruits and pastel carnations; smudged charcoal portraits of our faces reflected in polished kettles; and pencil sketches of this old granny with a really wrinkly face who used to come and sit for us every third Tuesday. Actually, when I say 'sit for us,' I really mean 'wriggle for us,' because she was forever fidgeting and changing her position. I guess she had piles or something.

Although we spent most of our art classes doing all that crap I've just mentioned, sometimes we were allowed to draw whatever we liked. I was well away then. One time I did this dead good picture of a nuclear explosion - a mushroom cloud in white chalk on black paper. It had loads of shadows all over it and looked as if it were exploding right off the page. In the foreground, I copied this photo of a girl who'd been napalmed in the Vietnam war.

I drew the girl running, naked and burnt, away from the blast (because she looked kind of Japanese and it was supposed to be Hiroshima and all that). The only colours I used (except for the white, of course) was a bit of pink and yellow and beige and crimson on the girl. I didn't colour her in completely. It was just an odd line of chalk here and a bit of a smudge there, if you can picture that.

Miss Thomas really loved the picture. When she saw it, her face lit up like someone had switched on a hundred watt bulb in her head. She rested both her hands on the table, one on either side of the picture, and stared down at it for ages, slowly nodding. Then, she looked me straight in the eyes, dead serious, as if she were about to tell me off or something, and said, "Well Peter, I think this kind of work deserves to be seen, don't you?"

Miss Thomas took the picture and pinned it up in the foyer where they used to put all the work that the A level students in the sixth form did (which was supposed to impress visitors when they came to the school, although most of it was actually pretty crap and boring).

However, the picture didn't stay pinned up in the foyer long. The Deputy Head Mr Houghton (or Wing Commander Houghton as the old cunt liked to call himself, even though he'd left the air force about two decades ago) said it was too political. He said that the naked girl was unsuitable for the kind of image the school was trying to project.

According to this girl, Nicky, who I used to sit with in geography (and whose mum was secretary of the PTA badminton club), during the lunch break the day after my picture had been stuck in the foyer, there was a massive argument in the staff room about it.

That twat Houghton and a couple of other sad old farts demanded that the picture be taken down. But most of the other teachers said it should be judged on its artistic merits. Freedom of expression should be encouraged not repressed, they said, and all that shit (you know what teachers are like).

Apparently, a lot of them who'd never even taught me (let alone asked me how I felt about such things) were going on and on about my struggle to express my innermost feelings about society and the futility of war. But that was a load of old bollocks. I only drew that picture because of all the different shadows on the bomb cloud. And, like I say, I only put that girl in the picture because she looked a bit Japanese and was naked (which I thought might wind Miss Thomas up).

Well, according to Nicky's mum, the teachers took a vote on it (being democratic and everything) and decided that the picture could stay. Then, the next morning the picture just wasn't there anymore. No one knew where it had gone. Probably that bastard Houghton took it down and burnt it when no one was looking. He was the kind of two-faced old wanker who wouldn't think twice about doing something like that.

Some of the teachers were quite upset that the picture had been removed. A couple of them even came up and apologised to me on behalf of the school. They said that they just wanted to let me know that they were 'as pissed off about it all as I was.' I didn't particularly care, though. It was only a bloody sketch.

Thankfully, the palaver surrounding the disappearance of my picture soon died down, and I went back to being just another pupil being processed through the system like a chunk of raw sewage. In common with most kids, I didn't exactly relish being treated like a piece of shit from nine till three thirty, five days a week. However I did most of the work I was supposed to and everything was going fairly well until I got to the exams, or to be specific, one particular art exam during which I had to do a still life of loads of cherries and pears and various other items of greengrocery.

Now, it wasn't that I had anything against painting fruit. In fact I quite enjoyed it. The problem was that the exam was meant to take three hours and I'd finished after forty minutes. I wanted to leave straight away. However, I wasn't allowed to go until (at the very earliest) half an hour before the exam was supposed to finish.

At first I just sat there staring out of the window quite calmly. But after I while I began to get really bored and frustrated. And gradually the feeling got worse and worse until I felt as if I were physically trapped, like a rat in a cage or something. And that's when I started to doodle. Firstly, I drew some wheels at the front of one of the pears and then a little cabin on top with a maggot sitting inside wearing a racing driver's helmet.

The motorised pear looked like it was about to run over a couple of cherries, so I painted scared expressions on their faces and then put this balloon coming out of the maggot's mouth.

He was saying, 'Get out of the bloody road,' like my dad used to when he was late for work. 'Get out of the bloody road, learn to drive you daft bugger.' All that kind of stuff. I don't know why I did it. I guess I just got carried away or something.

Well, as you might imagine, when Miss Thomas came over to see how I was getting on and saw that cartoon maggot talking to those cherries, she went totally bloody ballistic. She stood over me for ages staring at my picture. I could feel her glare burning into the back of my neck. And, although I didn't dare turn round, I could imagine exactly how she looked.

After a few moments, Miss Thomas bent down and whispered in my ear that she 'shouldn't interfere' Bloody right you shouldn't, I thought. This is an exam. You're not meant to say anything. But I just bit my lip and listened silently as she went on at me.

"It's such a waste," she said and gripped my arm to stop me drawing. I kind of shook my arm, but she wouldn't let go. "Come on," she said, "there's still time to start again," and all that kind of shit. "Please," she said, "If not for yourself, then do it for me."

I felt stupid then for messing up that picture and embarrassed because people nearby could see what was going on and were all looking at me and everything. And I began to feel this pressure building up in my head. I just wanted to rip that picture up and run out of the room and keep on running until I dropped down dead in a ditch somewhere. But I just turned and looked up at Miss Thomas and said, "Why don't you just piss off and leave me alone you interfering old bitch."

There was this moment of terrible silence, then her voice went all croaky and she said, "I am washing my hands of you do you understand? I have nothing further to say to you. Don't you ever dare speak to me again." Then she walked out of the room.

She could get pretty intense about things, Miss Thomas, considering how old she was. And she must have been pretty strong, because where she had gripped my arm I later found three finger-shaped bruises. They didn't hurt and faded after a couple of days. Funnily enough, I actually got a CSE grade 2 in art, which I was quite pleased with (not that it counts for much now though).

Even though it was a long time ago and Miss Thomas is probably dead by now, I wish I hadn't fucked up that exam and told her to piss off like that. I never meant to. It just kind of happened. I'm always doing things like that, things I wish I hadn't done. I just lose control sometimes and go kind of berserk. I don't know why. It just happens.

Generally, my brain works reasonably well (not always very quickly, I admit, but in a fairly normal way) like the plumbing in a house; a series of pipes and valves through which thoughts flow like water, and I can think and talk easy as turning on a tap. But sometimes it's as if I've got an air lock in my head somewhere. And I just can't think. I can't talk or anything.

A pressure starts to build up at the back of my head like there're all these thoughts jammed there, trying to burst through. My brain goes slower and slower and the pressure builds and builds until I can't even breathe properly. Then, just when I feel like I'm about to pass out, a million fizzing thought bubbles suddenly splurt into my head and I start gasping like crazy like I've just done a length underwater in a swimming pool.

It's hard to describe exactly how it feels. But the fizzing reminds me a bit of that super-strength sherbet that you used to be able to get. Space Dust, I think it was called. If you poured the whole packet on your tongue at once, it would explode in your mouth, zinging and pinging against your teeth and up the back of your nostrils. That's what it feels like when that air lock in my head finally bursts, Space Dust in my brain, pinging and zinging off the walls of my skull, then gradually subsiding, melting again into the clearest, purest, free-flowing consciousness you ever had, clear thoughts flowing through my brain as if nothing had happened and everything is back to normal, more normal than normal even, and I wonder what on earth has been going on.

I guess what I need is some kind of mental plumber (and I can tell you I've met a few of those in my time).

Anyway, when I get one of those air locks in my head and my thoughts start spurting everywhere, I'm liable to do something pretty crazy. Like, for example, one day just before last Easter when I suddenly decided to chuck my job in and piss off to Italy for a bit.

III

I was on this job, painting hoardings outside a new hypermarket (Safeways or Waitrose, I can't remember which) when it started to really piss down with rain. There was nothing we could do but sit on bricks and slabs piled beneath a makeshift shelter (a tattered tarpaulin stretched over scaffolding) and watch people waiting at the bus stop across the road.

The people seemed even more miserable than we were, which wasn't surprising really. Not only were they getting soaked by the pouring rain. They also kept on getting splashed by cars speeding through an enormous puddle which had swollen up at the edge of the road where it dipped toward the pavement.

The trouble was the drivers just wouldn't slow down. Maybe the bad weather had delayed them and they were hurrying to make meetings for which they were already late. Maybe the rain had made them miserable or maybe they just didn't give a shit about the people waiting by the bus stop. Either way, they all sped straight through the puddle, drenching a row of old grannies with dripping head scarves and mums with toddlers in little rainsuits.

Stood at the end of the bus queue was a man in a suit and a fancy patterned waistcoat which got covered in muddy water by a passing Volvo. The man totally blew his top and chased the Volvo down the road waving his umbrella round his head, as if it were a sabre, shouting, "You shit for brains. If I catch you. I'll shove this up your exhaust, you bastard." Or words to that effect. Of course, the Volvo was long gone by then. But it probably made the man feel better venting his anger like that, even though it didn't make his waistcoat any drier or his trousers any cleaner. The lads on the site thought the whole thing was hilarious. They clapped and whistled and called out stuff like, 'You fucking tell him mate,' and, 'Go on, get the cunt.'

After that, each time a car went through the puddle soaking everyone, the lads all cheered. It was a bit cruel of them, I suppose, clapping and calling out like that when the people were getting drenched. But they didn't really mean it nastily. They'd just got cold and wet and bored, stood there shivering and smoking. There was nothing else to do. It was too wet to work. The thermos of tea had been drunk and the one paper we had had gone all soggy and see-through.

There was some headline in the paper about an animal-mad man in the States who'd shot his neighbour because the neighbour had beaten his dogs. He'd been taken on a trip to a wild life park as part of his last request. The headline said Death Row Dan's Last Zoo Trip. Home from home really, I thought, with all those bars. There was a picture of Dan handcuffed to a security guard feeding a peach to a monkey called Oscar before he was hauled off to the gas chamber. The picture was showing through a page filled by a big-knockered teenager with nipples like coconut pyramids.

After a while I gave up struggling with the paper. And having got fed up with listening to the lads clapping and cheering every time a car splashed through that puddle, I decided to I'd pop down to the library. Of course, I didn't tell them that. I pretended that I was off to get a hot cheese and onion pasty and a cup of tea from the shopping centre (which was a mistake because then, of course, they all wanted stuff as well).

Paul ( who's got a ginger pony tail and always wears army surplus trousers covered in pockets) wanted an apple doughnut. And Nigel (who acts like he's a couple of bricks short of a full hod and was, as usual, wearing shorts even though it was chucking it down) wanted a Cornish pasty. So, grudgingly, I took their orders and headed off towards the library.

"You'll have to bloody swim for it," Paul called after me. And he wasn't bloody joking. Although the library was only a couple of minutes away and I ran as fast as I could, by the time I got there I was totally saturated.

I stood in the entrance lobby and shook myself like a dog, then pushed slowly through the security barrier, pausing to exchange a couple of rainy-day grimaces and smiles with this really good-looking librarian who was checking the date stamps in a pile of romantic thrillers and thrilling romances. Her smile warmed me up from the inside, the way a microwave oven defrosts a frozen pie. I was still pretty wet and bedraggled though and tried not to drip too much between the shelves as I headed for the art section.

I can spend hours wallowing in the impressionists - Cezanne, Renoir, Van Gough and my favourite artist of all time Marc Chagall. God I love those names. That's another reason I could never be an artist. I haven't got the right kind of name. I'm called Eddie Boyle. I mean, it'd be a great name for a rugby league prop forward or a darts player or a slobby, beer-gutted actor in some kind of down-to-earth soap opera, but it's not really the kind of signature you'd expect to find lightly pencilled at the bottom of a delicate water colour of fishing boats in the sunset.

Eddie Boyle - it makes me sound like a bloody dustman. Not that I've got anything against dustmen. In fact (between painting jobs) I've done a bit of that rubbish clearing business myself. So I appreciate how hard those guys work. And if it weren't for them we'd all be knee deep in aluminium pie trays, potato peelings and broken lampshades. But, honestly, how many dustmen do you know called Matisse or Cezanne or Caravaggio? See what I mean?

I often feel like changing my name, because I am actually called Eddie. My dad (who still wears his hair in a brylcreamed quiff) has always been a big fan of Eddie Cochran and unfortunately I was born on the seventh anniversary of Cochran's death. So Eddie, E-d-d-i-e, is actually what is on my birth certificate. I suppose it could have been worse (you know, Elvis or Buddy or something).

I don't want a completely new name, but sometimes I wouldn't mind being called Edward, like the kings. Edward Boyle. Now, that might look all right scraped into the burnt sienna paint at the bottom of an industrial landscape or hidden among a clamour of psychedelic daisies on some paint-spattered canvas.

Edward Boyle, heavy with the palette knife, uses it like a trowel, just doesn't care, slaps on the colours like a rainbow mud pack, ever so intense and terribly moody, mad as a hatter of course, but with an almost supernatural sense of light and perspective. Yea, Edward Boyle the impressionist genius. I could go for that. But, for the time being, I will have to be content to remain Eddie Boyle, painter and decorator, until maybe one day someone decides they like one of my paintings and sticks it in a gallery somewhere.

Anyway, as I was soggily leafing through the art section of Westing Library that dismal afternoon, I came across this book called Reflections of a Floating City which was all about pictures that had been painted of Venice. The book included loads of paintings by really famous seventeenth century Italian artists, with names that sounded as if they came off the pasta menu at Pizza Express. The depth of detail in some of those pictures was incredible. Looking at them, I could understand how an aspiring guitarist must feel listening to Jimi Hendrix, or a would-be footballer watching old footage of George Best in his prime. I mean, look at them for too long and you'd never want to pick up another paint brush again.

However, towards the back of the book, there was a chapter about more modern paintings of Venice, featuring quite a lot of new artists I'd never heard of. And as I looked through those paintings, I thought to myself, I could do bloody better than that. And I got to thinking about that artist in the TV documentary up in his warehouse in Glasgow with his greasy hair and his kettle, and I thought - yea, that could be me. And, for a moment, I was filled with this sudden surge of enthusiasm, stood there in the middle of the near-empty library, grinning inanely as I imagined being the esteemed Edward Boyle talking bullshit on some late night TV arts programme about the hidden meaning in my pictures.

Then, all of a sudden, I realised that the good looking girl in the library was smiling at me. She must have thought I was smiling at her. Maybe she thought I fancied her or something. Or maybe she even fancied me (hey, it costs nothing to dream).

Actually, more likely the girl thought I was completely loopy standing there clutching that book and staring into space. Yea, she probably just thought I was one of those misplaced nutters you tend to see wandering aimlessly around libraries and was just being kind. She was that kind of girl.

I glanced down at my watch (which is a kind of habit I have when I catch someone looking at me accidentally, like you do on a train or in the pub or something) and I realised I had been gone from the site for about an hour.

The sun had come out, and a quick glance through the half-misted library windows told me that the rain had stopped some good time earlier. Oh shit, I thought, I better get back to work pretty sharpish. I went and put the book back on the shelf, then, trying my best to appear nonchalant and sane, hurried past the still-smiling girl and out onto the puddled street.

When I arrived back at the site, the gang had restarted painting.

"You took your time," said Nigel. "Where's me pasty?"

Of course, I had clean forgotten about it and Paul's apple doughnuts. That pissed them off, I can tell you. Especially when I wouldn't tell them where I'd been.

They're nice enough blokes Paul and Nigel and the rest but I don't think they're really into libraries and art and things like that. It would have been difficult to explain it all to them, so I just said I'd been wandering around town. They all presumed I'd gone off to meet some girl somewhere and spent the rest of the afternoon ripping the piss out of me.

"Oi Eddie you've been working for five minutes ain't it about time you had another hour off?"

"Ain't it time for your shag-break yet Boyle?"

"Who's your bird anyway? Must be pretty special to keep you away for that long. Yea, she must be pretty special"

"I heard she won a beauty contest."

"Yea?"

"Yea...Crufts!"

"Ha ha ha"

"Oi Boyle this is planet earth calling. I'm fucking starving. Where's me fucking doughnut?"

"Yea and what about my pasty"

"Probably fed it to his dog."

"Ha, ha, ha."

"Don't laugh his bitch won first prize didn't she Boyle? A year's supply of Bonio I heard."

"Ya, ha, ha."

"Oi Eddie, ain't it time for a tea break? You been working ten minutes!"

"You ought to nip out and see your bird again."

"She might be getting lonely without you."

"Yea, chained in that kennel all day by herself."

"Ho, ho, ho"

"Time you went and gave her her Pedigree Chum Eddie."

"First time I've heard it called that."

"Ha, ha, ha."

It was quite funny for a while, I suppose. But after about half an hour of them going on about Winalot and dogs and doughnuts, and barking and woofing and asking me if that was my bit on the side, every time a somewhat less than desirable young lady happened to pass by, it all got a bit tiring.

They're all right that lot. But sometimes I wish I could talk to them about something other than what they'd watched on TV or how many pints they'd drunk the previous evening, how the goalkeeper of their Sunday League team couldn't catch a cold or what they wouldn't mind doing to any and every big-boobed shop assistant who had the misfortune to pass by.

Actually, to be fair, Paul and Nigel aren't as bad as the rest of them. Nigel, is generally regarded as Mr Shit-for-brains (because he's fat and shy and wears shorts even when it's snowing and tends to speak pretty slowly). But what they don't know is he's got this really fantastic garden. It's won awards and everything.

Nigel's garden is quite thin but very long, about a hundred feet I'd guess, with tall brick walls on either side. It's divided into three sections with a path winding all the way through. The first section is planted with all kinds of different flowers that bloom at different times of the year, so it's always full of colour. The next bit is a vegetable garden where Nigel grows these strange gourds, which are kind of like round marrows with spikes and stripes, and raspberry canes and even a peach tree up one wall.

Beyond the vegetable patch there's a hedge made of round trees with twisty branches (some kind of mutated hazel or something, so Nigel says). In the middle of the hedge, two of the trees have been judiciously pruned at the bottom and trained towards each other at the top, their corkscrewing branches tangling into a knotted, twiggy arch. Through the arch is what Nigel calls his arbour, a peaceful sun trap with a wooden bench in each walled corner and, in the middle of a semi-circular lawn, a statue of an angel (which came off an old Victorian house that had been demolished to make way for the second phase of some new housing estate).

In the hall of his house, Nigel has got all these framed pictures of this stately home where his dad (who is about seventy now) used to be head gardener. There're also a couple of articles about his garden that have appeared in magazines (proper gardening magazines). It's weird. He never talks about his garden at work or anything. I only know about it because I picked him up from his house a couple of times last summer when the engine on his Escort blew.

Sometimes, when the lads at work are slagging Nigel off (basically because he never goes down the pub with them and therefore isn't considered to be one of the lads), I feel like telling them about his garden and the magazine articles. But, besides the fact that Nigel is kind of protective and wouldn't want that lot to know about his arbour and his gourds and everything, there wouldn't be much point anyway.

The truth is, if I told the lads that Nigel knew all the Latin names of flowers and stuff they'd just laugh. Now, if I were to say I'd been out on the shant with Nige and he'd drunk twenty pints and tried to fondle a waitress in the 'Golden Dragon' and puked chicken and cashew stir fry all over the back seat of a taxi, then they'd be impressed. I mean, I like a drink. But surely there's more to a man than how much piss-weak lager he can pour down his gullet. There has to be.

Take Paul, for example. Now, sometimes (well, quite often in fact) Paul is nastier to Nigel than the rest of them put together. However he is actually quite a clever bloke, with a degree in Maths and everything. One evening, when me and Paul went for a quick pint after work by ourselves, he started telling me all about this kind of maths he'd done at University where there were no real numbers, just imaginary numbers which were named after letters of the alphabet. As far as I could understand, the different letters stood for numbers that exist but don't exist; for example, the square root of a minus number - which you can never work out because two negatives always make a positive.

After he'd had a few, Paul started explaining how if you had a football that was perfectly round, and if it were on a football pitch that was perfectly flat, then the ball wouldn't actually be touching the pitch at all. It would almost be touching, but not quite. I couldn't really get my head round that. I said that I thought the theory must be wrong, because in real life, whatever happened, a tiny little bit of the ball would be touching the pitch. And Paul nodded and said, yes, but that was because real life was always imperfect. Imperfection, he said, is what differentiates theory from reality. Which, I have to stay, seemed a surprisingly philosophical statement coming from someone whose normal use of mathematics was limited to awarding marks out of ten to the faces, tits, bums and legs of passing school girls (some, I might add, of a worryingly young age), as he hung off scaffolding with half his arse showing like some kind of grungey baboon.

Still, I guessif you sdpent enough time woith any of the lads individually you'd find that they all had some secret passion or talent, like me and my painting or Nigel and his garden or Paul and his Mathematical theories. The trouble is, once you get a group of blokes together in a pub they descend to their primeval roots and take on this tribal mentality. The all have to drink at the same speed, loll back on their chairs in the same way, offer each other their last but one cigarette and wink in a suggestive manner anytime one of the girls collecting glasses enters within a three metre radius of their beer mat.

As the evening progresses, the tribe, gathered round their beer-stained table, gradually slip into this strange kind of game. Someone tells a story in pub-speak (a ramnbling language which always mysteriously takes over your tongue after three or four pints). When the first person has finished their story, the person sitting next to them has to try and beat it by telling a story that is funnier, cruder or more far fetched. There is no specific moment at which the game starts or finishes and it has no specific rules (although there can be, and often are, definite winners and losers).

Me, Nigel, Paul and the rest play a particular version of this game, which if it were on TV would be called 'celebrity kitchen'. The game often starts wih an old mate of somebody's wandering into the pub and being invited to draw up a chair and 'join the tribe'. After he has offered round a pack of Marlboro (or perhaps even bought a round of lagers), the guest is challenged with the question 'what have you been up to lately then?'. At which point, the guest, eagre to justify his place at the table, says something along the lines of:

"You'll never guess whose bathroom I tiled the other week - only bloody Gary Lineker's."

And the game commence in earnest.

"I once artexed the ceiling of Rod Stewart's dining room and his missus made us a cup of tea."

"Well my mate's brother who moved to the States a couple of years ago is a telephone engineer, right. He rewired Jodi Foster's intercom. Mind you, it was before she was in that Silence of the Lambs."

Mind you, it were before she was in that Silence of the Lambs."

"Imagine if you went round to someone's house, right, and that bloke out of Silence of the Lambs, you know, that bloke who played Hannibal the Cannibal."

"Anthony Hopkins"

"Yea, him. Imagine if he answered the door wearing that mask and everything".

"I'd run a fucking mile."

"I'll tell you what, my mate Gary was doing this loft conversion, right. And he started lifting up the floor boards and he found this old towel, right, covered in something horrible and when he unwrapped it he found this meat cleaver, right, all covered in dried blood."

"Jesus."

"Fucking hell!"

"Yea. It turned out that this old boy who used to live there had done his old girl in and chopped her up and then bricked all the bits in the fireplace. And when they unbricked it all they found her head up the fucking chimney.

"You're fucking joking."

"Shit!"

"Well, we were like redecorating this old place. Like a mansion it was. And all my paint pots kept on getting spilled over and me brushes kept on disappearing right. I thought someone was just trying to take the piss, you know, wind me up or something. And then in this one bedroom this pot of paint falls all over the fucking carpet, for no reason. And it wasn't a cheap carpet neither. It were some kind of antique. So I went to the bloke who like owned the house, to tell him, right. He was this old boy with grey hair, all greased back, and a really white face with little veins sticking out all over it."

"Sounds like fucking Dracula!"

"He didn't have bolts on the side of his neck an' all did he?"

"No, listen. Straight up, right. I told this old boy about the paint and the carpet and that and I thought he'd go mental right. But he just sat there looking at me dead strange and noddin' his head. I says to him, are you all right mate? And he says, It's Albert. And I says, who's Albert? And he says, it's his great, great uncle, right. He's a flaming ghost."

"Fuck off".

"No straight up. This old boy Albert had put it about a bit. And one night a couple of hundred years back, when he was sleeping in that room, he was strangled by some jealous lover, and his soul had never been layed to rest."

"You daft cunt."

"No, listen, right. We went back in the room, me and this old guy, and my roller was fucking flying around. We both saw it"

"Bollocks."

"It bloody was. I tell you, I practically shit meself." And so the game goes on.

Another popular version of the game is what you might call the 'housewives I have had' version.

The champion of this particular game is a guy called Trevor who makes out that he has shagged just about every woman he has ever met. He makes Casanova look like a flaming monk. Now, I wouldn't say that Trevor is hideously ugly, but he's no Rudolph Valentino. Put it this way, if Trevor really does have some hidden charm which makes even the most frigid of women fling their thighs apart the moment he walks in a room, then he hides it extremely well. Honesdy, the stories he comes up with.

Just for example, Trevor reckons he was in this house once, fitting some skirting board to this woman's stairs when she appeared on the landing above him wearing a see through leopard skin dressing gown with nothing on underneath. Apparendy, this woman said to him, 'what winks and fucks like a tiger?' Trevor said he didn't know. And then she just winked at him.

What Trevor claims happened next I couldn't begin to repeat. Let's just say he went up her staircase and got a good look at her landing!

It may sound a bit far fetched, but that story's tame by Trevor's standards, I can tell you. All I can say is, I must just get to paint the wrong houses. All the housewives I've ever met are kind of nervously polite and try to stay out of your way as much as they can as if you had some kind of contagious disease. And as for suburban nymphomania - well, the most I've ever been offered is a cup of Typhoo and a Jaffa cake.

I don't know, maybe Trevor has shagged some bored housewife sometime. But most of the stories he tells are pure fantasy. Of course, there's nothing wrong with having fantasies; pretending that things which could never happen have happened. There's nothing really wrong with that.

But what if you don't just pretend?

You know that feeling you get when you've brought a raffle ticket. Just a moment before they read out the number on the winning ticket, just for the tiniest moment, you're convinced that it's going to be your number. You really believe you might have won that portable colour TV or that magnum of champagne. Well, that's how I feel when I start thinking about being a real painter. And the feeling just won't go away. It keeps buzzing round my head like a fly and churning in my guts like some giant worm. I know I'm just a decorator and everything, but I keep having this vision of my pictures up on the wall of some gallery somewhere and people walking round looking at them. I try telling myself it's just some kind of crazy dream. But I just can't get it out of my head.

I can smell the gallery, all the paint and the polish. I can see mum and dad in there, nervously sipping wine with their coats on, still not believing I could really have painted those pictures. Nigel pats me on the back. Paul says something critical about perspective. And the rest of the lads lark about and laugh at a misshapen nude. Miss Thomas is there too, alone, having sneaked in just before the gallery closes. Her footsteps echo on the floor. A smile lights her face as she reaches up and touches a canvas. I can feel the texture of the paint through her wrinkled fingers, as in a back room I share a private joke with that Scottish painter from the TV documentary, who has come all the way down from Glasgow just to see my latest collection.

It's not like a normal dream. It feels like I'm really there.

It's difficult to explain this feeling to anyone, even to people like Paul and Nigel who actually care about something. Now, I'm not saying Paul doesn't know anything about Maths, because he does. But he's never going to be a famous mathematician. When he comes out with all that shit about perfectly round footballs not touching perfectly round football pitches, there's no passion there. He's like a little boy reciting his two times table to an attentive aunt.

Now Nigel, I grant you, does have a genuine passion for his gardening.

But his dream ends at his garden wall. If I were Nigel, I'd want to landscape the entire planet. But, I don't think he'd even understand what I meant if I said that to him (and Paul would probably just try and prove to me with some complicated equation that it wouldn't technically be possible).

A couple of times I've thought of asking the girl in the library out, because she seems kind of friendly and I can sense that she would understand what I was getting at if I said I wanted to plant flowers over the whole world. But, besides the fact that she'd probably turn me down, anyway, I know if we did agree to see each other, it wouldn't be so that we could talk about art and stuff. The truth is, the reason I'd want to go out with her is because she's easy to talk to and has got a nice smile, isn't too fat, too thick or too posh and her tits are OK And if she agreed to go out with me, it would be because she was lonely and was flattered by my attention, or because her last boyfriend was crap in bed and she thought that as I read loads of books about 'romantic art' I might be more likely to provide her with a comparatively sensitive shag.

IV

A couple days after that rainy day (the day I'd got soaked and read that book about Venice in the library and forgotten to buy Paul's doughnut and everything) I was walking home from the site. The reason I was walking home was because my van wouldn't start in the morning. It's a pain like that.

In the summer it goes like a dream. But in wet weather - well, you might as well forget it. I've tried cleaning off the plugs, charging the battery, spraying about ten cans worth of WD40 on the HT leads. But, whatever I do, if it rains for more than two days in a row, well the starter motor just spins and spins itself to death for a decent spark and I end up running to the bus stop.

So, I was walking home from the bus-stop at about ten to six on this damp March evening and, as I passed the travel agents, this picture in the window kind of caught my eye. And the reason the picture caught my eye was because I'd seen it in that book in the library Reflections of a Floating City. It was one of the modem pictures (one of the ones that I thought I could have painted) of a pinkish woman in a floppy, wide-brimmed sun hat lazing back in a gondola emerging from beneath a bridge. Just to the right of the picture was a piece of A4 photocopier paper bluetacked to the window.

On it, hand-written in luminous green pen, were the words - coday's special, EASTER NEAR VENICE, £87, flight only, seven days.

Fuck it, I thought. I'm going to Venice.

But then I began to feel rather like a character in one of those moralistic cartoons - a man who has a mischievous imp on one shoulder and a self-righteous angel on the other.

"Going to Venice. But what about the job?" said the angel.

"Sod the job. Sod everything," said the little imp. "You want to be a real painter don't you? Go to Venice and paint proper pictures. It's only eighty d " seven poun s.

"But what about the rent?"

"Fuck the rent. Did Van Gough worry about the rent? Did Van Gough save twenty pences in a jar to pay the gas bill? Like fuck he did! He didn't care about anything but his art." "Yea, well, you ain't Van Gough are you?" "Fuck off I'm going."

And I felt like a kid who's been dared to run across the railway track and hears the train coming, but runs anyway.

"But you can't just go," said the angel, as I raised my hand to the door of the shop. "Not just like that." But as the town clock struck six, I went inside.

"Sorry, we're just closing," said one of the two ladies in the travel agent's. Her colleague, who already had her coat on, looked up then looked down again, picking chipped pink varnish from the edge of a finger nail.

"Its about that Venice thing," I said, letting the door swing behind me, my voice trembling as I spilled out what I wanted to say in a jumbled rush of words (denying the angel on my shoulder any chance of changing my mind).

"Itls the eighty seven pound trip. I don't know if it's too late, but if it isn't I can pay right now with my Visa card. And my cash point's only thirty seconds down the street there, if you'd prefer cash. I mean, it's only just gone six and I guess the flight leaves like today or tomorrow or something

yea?

The lady behind the desk, the one who didn't already have her coat on, forced a smile (a smile like an old slice of watermelon - wide, red and juicy but dry round the edges) and just about managed to unravel what I was on about.

"The Venice flight leaves from Heathrow at seven fifty five tomorrow morning," she said. "you do realise there's no accommodation included?" "I'll find something" I said.

"You're travelling by yourself?" "Yea," I say "I'm a painter."

But she didn't seem the least bit interested. She tapped away at her computer then rang up and ordered me the ticket as I got out my Visa card.

At the time, I only sent ofT for the card because they were giving away a free Walkman with it. However, I have to admit it had turned out to be quite useful - mainly for applying Polyfilla to cracked walls.

After picking the larger flakes of dried plaster from my card, the girl managed to get the machine to accept it. She tapped away at her computer again, scraping plaster from beneath her nails with the lid of a blue biro as she waited for each new screen to come up. She went over to a printer in the comer, which clattered away loudly for a few moments. The girl tore a strip of paper off the printer, stapled it to the Visa receipt and handed the whole lot to me.

"Is this the ticket then?" I asked.

She gave me a look which didn't exactly hide the fact that she thought I was totally thick.

"Hand this in at the Air Italia desk at terminal one and they'll have your ticket for you there," she said patiently and smiled another watermelon smile. "Enjoy your trip sir." "I certainly will," I said, and the other lady with the coat and the chipped nail varnish held the door open as I stumbled out onto the street.

Back home, I was buzzing around like some manic contestant on a TV game show. It was like - 'Eddie, you have sixty seconds to find eve1Jthino in the house that you mioht need to take on a one week vacation to Northern Italy....and your time starts... now!!!' That wasn't as difficult as it might sound, because when I say 'find everything in the house,' I actually mean, 'find everything in the room,' because that's all I've got - a room. In fact, most of my things are crammed into one cupboard, so they're not exactly difficult to locate.

When I moved out of my mum and dad's house and into the place I live in now, I took everything with me - my record player, my records, my football boots, my art stuff, my painting gear, my clothes and a few other bits and pieces. When all those things were scattered over the bedroom carpet it seemed like I had loads of stuff. However, I somehow managed to squeeze everything into the back of my van all in one go. It seemed a bit sad really. I mean, say I'd had an accident and my van had exploded or something. There would have been nothing left behind. Not so much as a sock or an old cassette case to remember me by. Still, like I say, at least if I ever want to find anything in a hurry all I have to do is rummage in the cupboard for a bit.

There are two rooms in the house where I live (not including the bathroom and the kitchen and the big room downstairs, where the landlord, who's a roofing contractor, stores a load of tiles and stuff). I share the house with Gary, who's a chef in a hotel. Sometimes he makes a bit of noise late at night, especially if he's brought home one of the waitresses. It can be a bit annoying sometimes as he's got a really creaky bed (and most of the waitresses appear to be very bouncy). However ,he generally leaves for work before I get in and tends to eat on the job, so most of the time it's like I have the place to myself.

 
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