This is Part Two of a True Story - Please Read Part One First.
Prelude
The 1980s, the arrogant decade which boasted Thatcher and Reagan, wore its colours proudly. Money was everything, capitalism was Boss, the West could do everything it wanted to do and better than anyone anywhere else, winning every war it chose to back. The USA ran South America as it chose via paid up surrogates and CIA plots, and Great Britain started a small, vicious war with Argentina. Meanwhile, we English-speaking normals lurched from miserable recession, to depression, to working class oppression.
As the end of the Cold War dragged its heels, USA parked nuclear warheads on British soil while fantasy American soaps Dallas and Dynasty ruled British airwaves. Happily for me, in the early 80s I didn’t have a TV so I didn’t have to suffer the Falklands war propaganda nor cheesy TV crap, living on a shoestring budget as I was, in a cheap shared rental property, part of Habberfield, a housing co-op in north London which specialised in providing unpredictably short-term lets.
To get into one of their properties we had to play our part, converting unliveable empty properties which were scheduled for refurbishment or demolition to just about functional homes. First, the plumbing, then the hole in the roof, last, the extra long nails banging shut the Bad Room, the one where the speed-freak squatter had once lived. It had huge pentacles chalked over every surface, on the black walls, the ceiling, the plank-shuttered window. We found bones hidden under the decaying wooden floor, and only stopped feeling spooked when we realised they were chicken bones.
Despite the lack of civilised amenities, these Bohemian digs beat official student accommodation hands down on both price and freedom, providing ad hoc friendship groups, life-long friends, the freedom to indulge hedonistically, and party venues as required. Of all the life experiences which began in this young adult heyday, one which has never left me is a particular recurring dream.
I have experienced vivid dreams all my life, for better or worse, but there is a kind of dream which has frequently found me. The dream manifests itself like a non-identical twin; in other words, it is not exactly the same as any previous dream, but it has so many similarities to othe dreams that significantly characterise it as a particular recurring dream that it is unmistakable. The narratives, the backgrounds, the locations, my reactions to being there, and the sense of it being a real lived experience are always the same.
I have been visiting these dream locations for 40 years now.
Some typical examples: I am going back to live somewhere I know well, and unlike many dreams I remember everything in detail. No real dramas, but many oddities. It is a repeated return to a place I have lived, except not in waking life. The narratives vary within a broad theme - I am coming back to my rooms in a shared multi-storied house after spending time away. I find new occupants in the building and converse with them. Or, I return to pack stuff up, spend time looking for things, and my stuff is elsewhere. I can’t find my room, or someone has moved into to it. As for my reaction, I don’t panic, it’s just a problem to be solved. Not all my dreams are like this..
These days I don’t have these particular recurring dreams as often as I did in my youth, but the themes are similar whatever the situation. One of the freakiest experiences is that in these dreams, I recall other dreams, and if not in full, then key details. The interior layouts of houses, buildings are familiar if not exactly the same as other dreams. I often know where things are - rooms, staircases, doors, the lot.
Earlier today, night became this morning, as it so often does. I was up at 5am, as if today is a work day, but it's not, it’s a Sunday, it’s New Year’s eve. So I fed the cat, had a light breakfast, and only having had six hours sleep, I decided to go back to bed. When I do that, I will often dream, and I remember these dreams easily, in detail. Today saw the return of the particular recurring dream.
In this, the last dream of 2023, there was a place I had to go to in a district in the city I didn’t yet know, one which I had never visited. I didn’t have the address, yet I had a picture of the whereabouts in my mind’s eye because someone had described it. I started chatting to a friendly woman who was maybe in her early 30s. She was in a large, light kitchen, mostly empty with some cheap white laminated furniture dotted about, as if it was either about to be refurbished, or halfway through being dismantled. She was sitting at a formica table. She said she was from the organisation which was sorting this out. My mild concern evaporated, now I would get the location of my future home. As we talked, I made reference to something, and searched for it in my bag. I found the document I wanted, but when I looked up, she had gone. The dream continued. As I tried to recall the directions I had been given, I met more people, had conversations, saw things. And then, of course, I woke up.
Popstar the cat was next to me, on top of the duvet, snoring. My left hand was numb, one of those neuropathy moments that happens from time to time, depending on my sleep position, a legacy of a particular traffic incident.
Dear Reader, this is not a dream. Part One of this particular story ends with my arriving in London. To remind you of that, here is a recap, a device used by Charles Dickens who would repeat a snippet of the last episode to jog the memory of his readers. It was also used by those 1980s American soaps. Time plays with us - the way out of that is to beat it at its own game.
(Recap of Part One)
London was crowded and busy, but at least it had lots of jobs, and it had buses that didn’t cost an arm and a leg which ran several times a day. Also it helped that I knew the shortcuts to get places. I was however starting to hurt. My brain hurt, my body hurt. My sentences were indefinite, my days and nights underlined by dread. My sleep was all over the place.
I was allergic to loud noises even though I was still slightly deaf, and while I had zero recollection of The Actual Bang, my limbic system was looking after it for me. On London double deckers in London traffic you get many loud noises happening at random. When such a noise happened, if I didn’t like the sound of it I would react spontaneously, calmly getting off the bus at the very next stop. This was often foolish, as mostly I wasn’t anywhere near my destination. I was aware that I was being triggered, and knew I would have to remedy this. Then I got on another bus, and… off we go again.
Earplugs helped, but this was just one of many such behavioural quirks which surfaced as Autumn turned to Winter. Another was tears. Not that I worried about showing emotions, but the regular emission of tears was unpredictable in the extreme, and so frequent I sometimes became dehydrated, and couldn’t work out why. Triggers for lachrymosity could be sad, happy, or unfortunate news; they could be nostalgia for past losses, gone and never to return, or wistful longing for better futures, never to appear. It could be being let down, or my letting someone down.
Music of all kinds, art, the offer of company, or just the existence of any of these three could render me useless, anti-social, and utterly overwhelmed. Finally, the physical pain started to make itself known, and I admitted to being vulnerable. That word saved me - honest, but adult. I could say that without wincing.
Three months later I registered at a medical centre and explained I was new in town and was suffering from being side-swiped by a 7 tonne truck some months previously. Yes, the nice doctors agreed, I was suffering. They were right.
You’re screwed! they didn’t say, and you’ve just started to notice how much. Jolly good!
We don’t even know how you’re standing! they exclaimed with a jocular smile. I didn’t smile.
You even make sense sometimes. “Thanks” I thought ironically, grateful for a miniscule mercy.
Are you sure you’re not totally OK? “Of course I fucking am. I showed up, didn’t I?” I didn’t reply.
We can’t help you but the psychologists can. Let’s get them to do some triage. Over the phone. Meanwhile, and with an invisible wink the doctor said, do you want some pills to help you cope?
So it began. Finally, NSAID said hello.
(End Recap Part One)
Part Two - The Interview
In Somerset, early winter ice had formed, melted, and formed again on the steep streets high on the Somerset hill where I lived. The further away time moved me from the traffic incident, and my failed attempts to replace the car with a bike, the more I struggled. Everything that had been a simple task became a challenge cloaked in dread.
Good friends and family members encouraged and supported me as best they could, their kindness producing in me both gratitude and guilt, the latter because I blamed myself for needing help. I grudgingly accepted the gap in my memory, hoping it would one day be recovered; but I was still exasperated by it, frustrated all the more by the pointlessness of cursing fate.
Confronted by routes leading nowhere, my olde worlde dark humour turned pitch black. I became a character in a long-forgotten Victorian novel who had failed to live up to his name, Mr. Always B. Reliable, becoming the laughing stock of the town. Fair do’s, I was still trying to adapt to my depleted situation, but at least I was continuing to work, producing videos, and it wasn’t like I’d lost everything as a result of an extravagant lifestyle, or that I’d caused it by obsessions, addictions, gambling, booze, drugs, or buying Glastonbury tickets, for heaven’s sake! Apparently, I’d been side-swiped by a 7 tonne truck on my way home from work!
I had to remind myself of the facts, as much as I had them. Sometimes I fought myself to regain calm. This is the aftershock, I sagely advised myself, trying not to slip over as I walked on salt scattered paving stones; and I knew it for what it was: anger and grief, mixed with confusion and a hefty dollop of random fear, all of which could fuck off anytime soon, as far as I was concerned.
I had to move on and out, and I needed to find a new place where my way to work was via reliable public transport, and the only place I imagined I might be able to survive was London.
After two months of looking, thanks to a stroke of luck born of my refusal to give up, I found a place to live in south London which would house me and Popstar the cat. This particular two-up, two-down mid-terrace house had a massive garden with a huge, watertight, self-built summer house = zero storage costs. Miraculously, this gave me space for bags, suitcases, the tools of various trades - education, writing and media - shed things, bike things, and two dozen boxes of “priceless artefacts” aka books, pens, pencils, art, art-making implements, recording devices, recordings, musical intruments, computers, sentimental collections from my personal history. My bike, clothes, shoes, furniture, kitchen stuff could all fit either in the house, or outside the backdoor, and the bookcase could go in the living room.
I’d been to see the place, my new house sharer liked me, so did the landlord. I re-wrote the tenancy agreement (the old one was all over the place), paid the deposit, and was leaving in a matter of weeks, yet I hesitated to be optimistic. I was after all attempting to plan with a mind made of scrambled eggs, which was mostly hidden from others, and also cleverly though not deliberately hidden from myself. I was just shielding as much as I could from the aftershock.
Before I could leave town I had to deal with the small matter of the legal consequences stemming from a certain traffic incident in which I had been involved. After waiting more than two months for it, I’d been formally interviewed by the police a few weeks earlier.
Looking back, using that pre-eminent tool of convenience, hindsight, before this serious formality I should have organised a visit to a doctor to help me explain what a shocking mess I was in as a result of the traffic incident. This was obscured because I was shielding vulnerability in order to cope. I was in denial without awareness of its full extent, because that’s how denial generally works.
The reason for denial’s existence is mostly in order to sustain mental functioning, for better or worse, while coping with trauma. The crash had neither put me in hospital, nor buried me six feet under, nor burnt me to a disfigured crisp, and yet some days I felt as if all that had happened. Oh no, I wasn’t dead enough for that. Instead, I had been traumatised in various ways, and was unaware of most of them, except that fucking aftershock, which without noticing I blamed for most of it.
In fact, in all the months since the crash, I hadn’t visited a health practitioner of any kind. For months afterwards I was convinced I had done, because of the hearing damage; later I found a notebook entry and realised I’d made an appointment. I remembered making the call, but failed to show up. That’s another thing Doctor Denial and Nurse Shock will do - continue to erase and alter memories, just doing their job, trying to help.
Into the Police Station Interrogation Room I went, along with the duty solictor who had been commissioned to represent me. Here, the police told me they had five witnesses that I was the sole cause of the traffic incident, all of whom contradicted my one witness, the kind lady whose number and name I had written down. I answered every question that I could, except their questions about the moment of the crash, which I couldn’t remember. The only memories I had were the three boys on motorbikes on Shit-Truck’s tail, the truck driver telling me it was all my fault, and the kind lady telling me that both vehicles had been “high on the road”.
My ears were ringing throughout this ritual - a legacy of the airbags (see number 7) which probably saved my life - so I couldn’t hear all of what they said. I tried to lip-read, out of courtesy more than in the expectation of better understanding them. It gradually dawned on me that my observation at the crash site that the police were all rather chummy with Mr Shit-Truck Driver was proving correct. They dismissed my kind lady witness out of hand. She had given them a completely different account, they said, but they didn’t show it to me. They didn’t even check her name, they were so disinterested. It soon became clear that at far as they were concerned it was all my fault, and they had the weight of numbers. How could I possibly challenge this? I couldn’t. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. The interview was ended. I should not disappear, I was told.
As made my way out through the carpark, along with me came the duty solicitor, who expertly performed an unself-aware impression of Leonard Rossiter’s Reggie Perrin. Now out of police earshot (except for the carpark microphones) picking his nose, he asked me why didn’t I just admit fault. Surely I should do that, he said, it would save everyone such a lot of time and money. You’ve nothing to gain by keeping quiet. On he went. As he rambled on, I stared silently at his smiling, uncaring face in the knowledge that explaining to him that my memory loss was real, and assuring him I was doing my best to cooperate, whatever I said would be dismissed, much as his friends the police had just done. He gave me his card. I took it between two nails, and put it in a Greggs paper bag I had in my pocket.
As I bid him politely goodbye I reminded myself that I must give the police my forwarding address when I left town, so as not to become invisible.
Van der Valk
Now I had a place to go, but no driver, and literally just a few days to pack up, clean the house, and find a man with van big enough to contain as much as I wanted to take with me to the new place in the Smoke.
Living and working in Somerset for three years after many decades of visiting and staying over with friends, I had many good local contacts, all types of helpful people, so I asked around and around; but, so late in the year, the so-called ‘holiday season’ upon us, I could find nobody. I started to dream of large bailiffs with sneers and tobacco yellow teeth coming to politely ask me to vacate the premises. Finally I found someone that someone else knew who “did driving” when he wasn’t bashing skins, or as non-musicians call it, drumming. Friend of a friend, should be alright, sort of thing.
We struck a deal on Facebook.
Two days later, Mr Driver arrived late, clearly hungover. The long wheelbase van the driver he had described was in fact only two thirds the capacity advertised, the central section being full of seats with a load of random items almost completely filling the space. I sensed this might be tricky.
We set to loading. I was moving things out as fast as I could, and as I did so, his wife, who had not been mentioned, showed up. Mrs Non-Driver immediately got in my way, started “being helpful” aka bossy and disruptive. After an hour moving carefully prepared loads without asking, she was seriously slowing me down. Then she went outside and had a furious argument with hubby. She returned to claim our agreement was null and void. I said, we agreed what we agreed, and carried on. She cursed and ranted. Then, having slowed me down, she complained about my lack of speed. On it went, constantly picking holes, her main themes being to demand more cash and to be abusive with it.
After an hour I saw the double act. Mrs Non-Driver steadily became quite violent in her bullying, spitefully diminishing me as often as she could, while he threw tantrums and stormed off. He should be helping me load - as agreed - and she shouldn’t be here. I was being distracted, so I expected them to take advantage of this. Sure enough, I found one of my personal bags missing, containing a few precious things, a watch, a wallet. I stopped and searched the van, and found my wallet and a few other pieces, my bag in a bag on the passenger’s seat. She said she hadn’t put it there. Well no one else did, love. It was a minor but important victory - I looked stupid, but I was sharper than she thought.
They continued to pile on the pressure, firstly, I figured, to divert me from reducing the price because of the insufficient space in the van, and secondly to see how many bees and how much honey they could squeeze out of me. I ignored it all and kept going - what else could I do? Carry. Load. Continue.
In this insane war of attrition, I just about resisted them, finally showing Mr Driver a firm ‘no’ when as we were just about to leave he started on his pièce de résistance, a face to face demand for more money. I pulled out my empty wallet and said, “that’s all I have. You’ve got everything I had.” It wasn’t true. My cash was in a different wallet, this was the one his Mrs had tried to nick earlier, but after all the scamming and screaming and blatant lies I could be forgiven this lie to him.
Eventually they relented somewhat, or rather, he did - Mrs Non-Driver didn’t give a shit. Because of the misrepresentation of his van’s capacity we had first to drop off a lot of stuff in a storage unit miles away, costing me a whole lot more cash and three more hours. Finally, I had to leave of stuff behind, as one sometimes does when moving, but I had only ten minutes to make decisions. Goodbye sofa, chest of drawers, goodbye nice garden pots, goodbye shed things. Goodbye Somerset.
“Right, we’re going, get in now! Get in! Get the fuck in!” in unison they shouted and shrieked from the cab.
Fuck it. I slowed down, remembering I had to take the letter with my new address to the Police Station. Fed up with being reasonable, I walked up to the driver’s window, showed them the envelope, and said, “I have to post this. Ten minutes.”
I took a slow twenty minutes. The Police closed at weekends, but the letterbox was open. Done. Then to the highstreet, where I wrote a lovely Christmas card to the letting agents as I posted a set of keys through their door.
Back at the van, Mr D. and Mrs Non-D. were as furious as I was impervious. I was just flat, I was dead tired, but they were even more exhausted, weakened by hours of maniacal rants, and totally out of gas.
I opened the side door, got in the van.
We set off for London.
We went east.
On the road, in December darkness, I sat in the back of the van with Popstar in her basket by my side. She was amazingly calm. She knew what was up, though I had sheltered her from the worst of it. She purred loudly when I stroked her between the ears.
I was hollowed out, but with all its chaos, imperfection, loss and the abuse, I had done it. A voice came from the cab - with a late dramatic spit, shrill Mrs Non-D. instructed me to say nothing! Not a word!! Not a fucking… and she petered out into theatrical mumble as Mr Driver turned on the radio. That suited me fine, since I wasn’t talking and had long stopped caring about anything either of them said. A part of me could scarcely believe I had coped with their shit, until I remembered some rough schools I’ve worked in, the ambush gangs of Bridgwater, the classroom witches of Street.
Yeah, no contest, Mr and Mrs. None at all.
I was pleased I’d remembered to post that letter.
I was visible.
The van made mile after painful mile, into cold dark rain. After an hour or so I sarted to feel a mixture of grief and relief, grief because I was really going to miss my friends, and the schools, and the greenery, and music, and joyful kindness; and relief because I was finally out of there.
Tears started to land on my sweat-soaked shirt. At first, I thought the van was leaking.
I have never wept so silently.
I was inaudible.
When, hours late, we got to the house in South London, Mr Driver helped empty the van, was even cheerful about it, but kept the wooden bookcase shelves, later attempting to ransom them for “his cash”.
A couple of months later I got them back without shelling out a single penny.