Andrew J. Kingston

2001

Year of attachments

 

2001. The year of attachment. Or rather, they year of detachment. Better still, the year attachments came apart like soggy cardboard. I realised, after this year, once again, that I’d lead a sad existence and end up leading a solitary existence.

 

Anyway, my attachments, such as they were in 2001. School had finished. I’d stayed in touch with two of my former classmates who along with my brother and one my former classmate’s brothers, had been my social anchors for the preceding five years. Or four and a half years. Since leaving home and moving to London, I’d detached from them. And my family - demonstrably - to an ever greater extent. In time, I realised I’d moved away but thankfully hadn’t left them behind, but in 2001, it seemed I had.

 

I’d also detached from my first serious girlfriend. Not my first actual girlfriend and not the woman I fell for hardest and missed the most. But my first proper ‘partner’. We lived together, shopped together. That sort of thing. Never got round to finishing each other’s sentences, mainly because I couldn’t operate at her level and she couldn’t be arsed or wasn’t interested in mine. Nor did I ever finish my own sentences. Why the hell should I? Better to make a vague point and leave it lingering. I was, and remain, a blurred, unfinished sketch of a person. All the accoutrements and corporeal elements and yet, somehow…….

 

I’m not going to mention my first serious girlfriend’s name, but will use ‘she’ instead, to show how messed up this year of attachment left me then, and how blasé about it I am now. I really am blasé; I really was messed up. Not as messed up as I wanted to be, due to exhaustion and new possibilities opening up for me; but messed up all the same. I suspect that’s what growing up is all about; a series of events and situations which take their source materials and gradually mess them up and form an actual personality.

 

Over its six month course, this new, mature, exciting, loving relationship went through so many ups and downs. Everything seemed to be point to an open-ended glorious future. Everything seemed bulletproof, but inexplicably became more difficult, fragile and every stage in between in the next six weeks.

 

We split up, but she realised maybe she hadn’t finished with me and came back, just to make sure.

 

October 2001. I’m fresh from being helped out of our house. Our former home, where things were no longer ‘sweet’. Abandoned by Tania (possibly her real name; probably not) and her two college mates against whom, oddly, I didn’t feel any resentment.

 

The kindest thing, she later told me. I begged to differ. I had no idea. Bang. That was it. A bolt out of the blue.

​

A letter she handed me the day after explained everything. I have no recollection what was in it. Arrangements were made about her picking up the last of her stuff and us needing to talk about our kitten. Fuck it - she could have the bloody thing. 

 

Not that I'd have a choice. By the time Charles and Ruth came round to talk me through the next couple of days, home life and the kitten were both memories.

 

I detached from Charles soon after he helped me move out. He got hold of a car or some other motor conveyance and moved me out from my shared zone 2 flat to a shared zone 3 flat, about two miles up the road. I didn’t know at the time, but Charles was in the process of detaching from Ruth.

 

Ruth never got on with Tania and tried to cheer me up by calling her bitchy names in her darkest Black Country accent.

 

It didn’t help.

 

I detached from Ruth and soon after, the two of them detached from each other. I don’t know what happened. Charles was intense and effeminate, Ruth seemed a little moody and had a lazy eye. For a while, hanging round with Ruth after we’d both detached from Charles, I wondered if I should have tried to attach with her.

 

Anyway, that was a little while later. Back to 2001.

 

My first night out, cycling from my flat in zone 3 to my college in zone 2. The plan was to get morbidly drunk and prove how things were already ‘over’ to my brand new college mates who I later attached with for a very considerable amount of time.

 

I was thinking all this, or something like it, about a week after Charles and Ruth saved my life and helped me move.

 

(They didn’t really save my life, in a literal, biological way, but they helped me readjust. Or just get out of the situation I was in. I’d’ve struggled without them).

 

I juddered to a squeaking halt at the lights at the botton of Crouch Hill, pointing my front wheel dead ahead, for Crouch End Hill. I’d acquired the judder the day before, having run over a bloke next to the Peabody Estate on Junction Road.

 

His fault.

 

I’d wished that bloke had been Phillip. Phillip, the reprehensible shitbag who’d stayed in a house which I considered home, taking over our spare room and moving in to our social life. Phillip had an aquarium, though thankfully, what with the kitten and all, a friend of his was looking after it for him. A mutual friend. Another scheming sharer of secrets I had no problem with at the time, even if I wasn’t so sure about him. I thought there was something contrived about him. Turned out I was right; I later found out he ate frogs’ spawn, claiming it would make him immortal.

 

Phillip kept snakes in this aquarium. It was one of the things I disliked about him, right from the off. Tania seemed to as well. As a vegan, she was appalled with the live mouse diet.

 

Phillip had had problems with heavy drugs. Problems he said he’d put behind him, which had I believed and, to be fair, was probably true.

 

I wished I’d run over Phillip that morning down Junction Road when I’d picked up the squeak and the judder in the bike, but it had been a joker in fluorescent walking clothes who wanted to make damn sure he was impressively visible as he stepped into the road right in front of me. One second, I was coasting downhill, with a wide empty bus lane on a straight road and no real care in the world except for vegans, live mice and snakes, then BANG!, some clown who’s not Phillip sidestepping any conventional use of pavements and stepping out in front of you.

 

Anyway, Crouch End Hill, waiting for the lights. The cars coming off Crouch Hill for The Broadway slowed, but on the outside, gliding past them, a cyclist pinged through. He wasn’t going to let them beat him.

 

It was Phillip.

 

He didn’t see me. He was concentrating on the road. Snake-keeping, ex-junky, girlfriend stealing Phillip. Fucking arse candle of a man.

 

I clenched my handlebars and as the lights changed, red to green, I wrenched my bike off the road. Phillip had come off the hill fast. There seemed little point trying to catch him. I hated him - hoped he’d fall off his bike and make his and Tania’s life even more miserable than it already was.

 

 

 

 

That evening, I drank morosely. Another pint or two might have tipped me into morbid, but I finished when I finished. I got home on a night bus, oblivious to the crappy people on the top deck and the danger of Turnpike Lane’s misfits, chancers and desperadoes.

 

Tania got word to me that week. She wanted to meet. I didn’t appreciate her demanding theatricality, but for some reason agreed and turned up. I was still under her crappy spell, thinking things might get better, which they never did. Not back to how it was, anyway. I hoped she was going to tell me she’d made a mistake taking up with Phillip. Two things back then; firstly, my pride, even though I kept it well buried, had been piqued at being turned over to an amphibian loving freeloader. Second, my pathetic idiot self wanted something better for Tania. For now at least, I still cared. Still hadn’t assimilated what she was doing to me.

 

When she’d told me she’d found someone else, I’d guessed it was Alec. Not Alec she’d said, suddenly looking as if she was hosting a TV quiz show and trying to work out my logic.

 

We entered a grim guessing game.

 

Me God. I don’t know. Charles?

Tania No. Charles knows though.

Me What?

Tania Don’t worry. I think he’s on your side.

Me Steve?

Tania Which one? My ex- Steve?

Me I don’t know...

Tania -

Me (after a long pause and a sudden realisation, which made me feel utterly ridiculous)

Oh God. Please. Please don’t tell me it’s Phillip?

Tania (with a slight frown, looking down and to one side, as if somehow trying to blame me for the whole sorry affair) I knew you’d figure it out…..

 

 

 

 

Tania didn’t tell me she’d made a mistake taking up with Phillip. She told me she’d messed up leaving me. And I believed her, hook, line and sinker. In a trice, the hurt, help and logic dissolved, feeling as if a weight was lifting from my tired head. Of course I wanted to get back together and aim for those idyllic days. Tania seemed to open the door, but we never got through. Her fault. Mine. Trying to get things back on track was like looking after a leaky bag of flour in a hailstorm.

 

After a hugely frustrating period in which Tania promised but said she couldn’t move out from her new place with Phillip. We got back together anyway. Phillip, his snakes, mice and ex-drug habit barely faded from the scene. Charles and Ruth, I can remember, weren't convinced. They may even have started to lose patience with me. I'd have started losing patience with me.

 

Ruth, in particular, was affronted on my behalf. She was right; getting back wasn’t the right thing to do. I was clinging on Not, in hindsight, to Tania but something more fundamental; the casually connected, happy-go-lucky me with a fantasy future fending off life long tedium and an endlessly cynical disposition.

 

The loss of who I’d been ended up blowing up in my face before, during and immediately after our break up and dragging on for another eight or nine months while we were 'officially together’.

 

'Officially together' was a phrase I hated. As if there was some agency recording who was in what status of relationship with whom. I adopted this phrase as we became more and more miserable. I’d changed from a person who delighted in dismantling such self-importance to wallowing in it.

 

By the time I realised Tania had used me to get disentangle herself from Phillip, Charles and Ruth were long gone. Tania’s guilt meant that even though things weren’t great between us right from the moment we got back together, she couldn’t end things. If I said I thought she might have had trouble finding someone to bounce to, it might sound harsh, but her endless moods, spiteful irritations and false cheeriness gave me a nasty feeling when I was in her digs. I went out a couple of times with her flatmate and got on much better with her...

 

Until she started talking fondly about Phillip.

 

I ended it after I found a house share and moved out for the new year. Any remnants of a romantic core to my soul had taken another beating. I was tired out, rather than angry.

 

It took me about four months to get this funk out of my system. I emerged feeling bruised and cleansed and at no point did I ever look and want to try and fix things and get back together. Or even hang out and confide and do the sort of things friends did, which I think is what she wanted.

 

I came out a better, sadder person. I realised I made progress about six months later. It was one of those beautiful, crisp mornings, feeling a hangover burn out of my head like spirit mist. I was cycling along and suddenly started thinking about Tania outside a shop where we’d met and said ‘hello’ to a decidedly non-committal and just about polite Ivor Cutler. This time, I saw another familiar figure. Not Ivor, but Phillip this time, dressed in stupid lycra. He was rummaging, turning away and trying to extract a bicycle lock from a painfully crap courier bag. I couldn’t care less. I calculated and got ready to either slow down or speed up in order that he should see me, but realised he wouldn’t. Even if he saw me, he’d look straight through me. He looked ok, which I found only mildly irritating. Doubtless, I’d have looked the same as I always did to him; an impression of a person with gaps and places which needed shading in. Someone, some thing to not really notice too much.