"The Small Friends"

I had been around my Nan’s small white cottage which was situated next door to the flat I rented above the Fiat Garage before I discovered Jib had allowed Russ and Bob into my private living space.

 

I had entered the flat and opened the bedroom door and I had found this late middle-aged man with white hair staring back at me with wide bulbous blue eyes. Who is this old man?! I was thinking. He was sitting on the cushions of the wicker chair Nan had given me and Russ was standing in the middle of the room saying, “this is Sam’s dad? Do you know Sam?” and I thought he may have meant another Sam we had known and I nodded an uncertain maybe. It turned out I didn’t know who Sam was.

 

Bob was holding a small contraption in his hands that was made out of an amalgamation of wood and household junk, dead circuitry, a folk and a spoon, and he said, “It’s a robot”.

Russ said, “Bob’s an artist”. My modelling of “artist” at this time was somewhat immature I believe in hindsight and I thought maybe at the time that must mean, he’s someone who draws very well. I was never entirely certain whether or not he did draw well.

 

My own room walls were covered in artwork, Monet’s, and Dali’s, and Warhol’s, and Escher’s, and Kandinsky’s. In addition, there were Pink Floyd posters; the Wall and Shine On, a Jim Morrison “American Poet” poster, and there were Egyptian postcards, Thoth, a pharaoh receiving a pipe, and Bob Marley and Sonic Youth postcards, and there were some of my own paintings and sketches, some on paper, and some painted directly onto my wall. At the far end of the room was a large oak desk with Woody Allen movies lined up in chronological order along the back, I would watch around two of his movies a day, like they were an electronic drug fix, and in the left hand corner of the room there was a BT phone box door that I had discovered unhinged and laying on the grass one-night whilst walking back to mine from Players with K, we carried the door half a mile up the hill, stopping every time there was a rumble of an engine or the glimmer of headlights. Through the glass, beneath the Mercury symbol were images lined up in a column, starting with one I had painted of Syd Barrett at the foot, and a glossy magazine poster of Woody Allen at the top.

 

Next to my bed was a small postage stamp sized image of Ziggy Stardust with flaming red hair. Juliet’s friend Anna had once pointed to the image and said, “A collage”. Anna was an artist. Behind the wicker chair Bob was sitting in was a decorated internal window I had collaged that I would sometimes catch Jib peeping through the cracks of. Above the window was a colour print of Dali’s Last Supper. I once had a weird experience whilst high looking at this image, I had kept it to myself at the time, but I had experienced seeing my face represented in the central character sitting between the twelve at the table. The following morning I had looked again and seen that the image wasn’t as detailed as I had imagined. Bob carried a large thick black and white roll of circular stickers that had an African mask in the centre and the words HIDDEN AGENDA printed around part of the circumference. This seemed novel and intriguing to me. 

 

I listened to David Bowie’s “Outside” album at this time, “We’ll creep together you and I for I know who the small friends are”. When I had played the album for Jib he had proclaimed, “You are what you listen to,” and he pointed out that I sometimes spoke in “a girly whisper”. Bowie had a character in the album who spoke in a whisper. I had asked Jib years before if he thought Bowie was a good singer and he responded with a resolute “No! I don’t”. I had seen Bowie at the Phoenix festival in Stratford Upon Avon earlier in the same year during his Earthling drum n’ bass flirtation. Bowie had double-taked, stopped, and looked me in the eyes during one of the songs. I was stoned with long blonde hair staring back at him with a deadpan stoical visage. The highlight of the festival had been Man or Astroman for me, they had performed on the first Thursday and I was high on some legal herbs I don’t know the name of, but were branded “Druid’s Dream” on the test tube, and at the climax of the show electricity had fired from on high and into a Van der Graaf generator.

 

I dropped out of college later in the same year; I had been studying Sociology and Psychology, Political History, and Social History. I wanted to be an eternal student, I called myself a psychologist, but I preferred reading Nietzsche, Joyce, and Epicurus.  

 

There was a loud knock on the inside door and as I let Bob and Russ into the flat I could hear Bob saying “open up it’s the pigs”. In my room Bob was flashing an old 1960’s edition of Dr Timothy Leary’s book, “The Politics of Ecstasy”. The book was passed to me and I studiously flicked through and when I saw the good doctor’s photograph printed in black and white on the back of the book I thought I seemed to recognise him from somewhere, he looked familiar. Later, I realised that Linda who had taught Sociology at the college had dumped a stockpile of paper print-outs onto the desk in front of me on the theme of the 1960’s counterculture, our first class assignment had been “subcultures” and Dr Leary’s image and McLuhanesque catchphrase had been amongst the papers. Other individuals in the class had received different print-outs and I guessed that I had been given the 1960s counterculture on account of my long-hair and permanently stoned visage. “I think you will like these”, Linda had said.

 

We were once asked as a homework assignment to draw an image on the theme of culture that would be displayed at the back of the classroom. I sketched an image of the pope that was duplicated exactly, so that there were two popes. When I handed the drawing in to Linda at the start of the next lesson, she had said, “Ah, an artist?!”, but the following week I noticed that the image I had drawn was seemingly the only image that was not on display amongst the others on the back classroom wall and I wondered why? It puzzled me. The sketch had seemed to me above average.

 

I scored reasonably well in tests, in fact it was said I’d scored the highest grade in the class on several occasions, but I could never be entirely certain whether or not they were trying to lay down a “self-fulfilling program” so that the newly laid perception of myself could improve future performances. I once answered correctly when the class was asked to name a female artist, the class had stuttered, and I said Barbara Hepworth. Her sculpture called the family stood in a ring outside the County Hall building. Once my chair was removed before I could sit down and I landed hard on the floor, I was angered, but kept my mouth shut and didn’t retaliate. An Asian dude on the course said to our other Sociology teacher Dave with regards to myself “he’s the only realistic person in the classroom”. Dave had thought I was weird, he even said so, “You are the weirdest kid in the classroom”.   

 

Bob had pointed to my VHS collection and said, “You have a lot of stuff”. I nodded the affirmative and smoked at a marijuana joint. In addition to Woody’s movies I had recordings of Dr Oliver Sach’s Mind Traveller series and I studied documentaries on Schizophrenia.

 

Russ drove me the few miles distance in his mother’s jeep to Bob’s house and I was somewhat uneasy when he pulled up the vehicle on Lupset Estate which had always seemed a rough neighbourhood to me with a bad reputation. Once as a young boy my second father who had been a taxi driver had warned me to “stay away from this part of town”, and I had asked “why?”, and he said, “Criminals,” and I said, “murderers?” and he said, “yes”.

 

It turned out Bob had more “stuff” than me and we sat in his small kitchen around a table. Hanging against the wall there was a large canvas painting, it seemed to be of a man, and Bob said, “It looks like a cactus”. Bob showed me a hand-painted pack of tarot cards and said they were given to him by a “schizophrenic who believed he was Jesus”, and I said, “Oh, that’s a delusion”. I was able to look through Bob’s artwork which seemed to be largely made up of multi-media collages. I had never seen artwork like this before, my art teacher from high-school called Mrs Garden always forbade us to use felt tip pens, “they’re ugly” she had said, but apparently this didn’t matter, and I was inspired.

 

When I next saw Bob he was standing with Russ on the precinct between Burger King and the Cathedral and I said “I’ve ripped all my paintings up” and his reaction wasn’t as pleasing as I had thought it might be. I had started to attempt to collage my work and re-mix and re-set the pieces.

 

One afternoon Russ, Bob, and I went off in his mother’s jeep to look at the art exhibits that were open to the public at Breton Hall College. They were examination pieces created by art students. It seemed Bob hadn’t been impressed with the pieces on display, but then he seemed not to rate any artist at all that I mentioned. He was almost anti-art it seemed; he mentioned a movement called Dadaism. I mispronounced “Duchamp” as “Der-Kamp” and I was corrected. I resonated with the messy bedroom piece, and I began to see my own flat as a work of art, Bob pointed to the futuristic robot. He sometimes called his own pieces Zombies.  

 

Bob had a neighbour in Lupset who had complained to the police about him and all the people that would frequently come and go from his house, Bob and his son had been arrested. There had been small quantities of cannabis in the house and the next time I was sitting at the table Sam had been angry with me for nonchalantly leaving a quarter block of resin out in the open in front of me. Later, after playing on his beat-box in his room which we could hear from the kitchen, he had come back downstairs and negotiated a few joints worth off my block, he was pushy. I didn’t like Sam, there was friction between us, he was a spotty heroin addict and was friends with all the rough people from my school years I always sought to avoid. Some of these people had been menacing when I was younger, I’d been punched, head-butted, and humiliated by several of them over the primary and high-school years, but ironically as I had been told and had come to learn, it was me that they called “a bully”. Bob had said the neighbour who had called the police on him was “a busybody, I know exactly what she’s like”.

 

Once I met an older lady called Alex at his house and she was presented as a performance poet. She seemed reluctant, but was goaded by Bob into reciting a piece she had written. It had been about technological appliances in the household and the piece seemed intricate to me, fresh, and exciting, and when she had finished I said dumbly, “are you technophobic?” and she said, “no!”

 

Bob had an old friend who seemed to have idiosyncratic motor ticks and he put a slab of paste onto my finger and told me to swallow. “It doesn’t taste nice,” he had said to me, and I put my finger in my mouth and I said, “This is okay”, and I swallowed and the disgust reflex hit as this grotesque chemical slime trickled down my oesophagus, “Urgh! It really doesn’t taste nice,” I said. People would come and go, and a young couple who were older than me sat down and engaged in conversation and I found that I was too slow to join in the conversation and at one point I was seriously and sternly rebuked for talking about where I had seen some Badgers whilst out walking one night in the woods, “but I wouldn’t tell anybody who would harm them”, “but you wouldn’t know if you’d just done that!”

 

Sam showed me his name at the bottom of the Hidden Agenda poster, I had one of the posters at home in my flat, and Sam had said it had been “an event in Leeds where he had DJ’d”, his father had designed the posters, and Sam showed me Kriss Needs’ name on the poster next to his name, he had being a member of Primal Scream I was told, but Sam said, “he’s a s**t DJ”.

 

At some point there was a man sitting next to me who was talking to Bob about David Bowie, and at times it almost seemed as though he was auditioning for a role to perhaps know Bowie. Bob was silent and the man said, “His last few albums have been great, he went off boil in the eighties, but he really has mounted a comeback with his last two”. I could remember feeling maybe a little bit jealous of this man. I thought I was perhaps more suitable for Bowie than he out of the two of us. Russ said to me a week later, “Bob said that man didn’t know s**t about Bowie”.

 

Bob moved to an old mill in Bately. It was situated left at a crossroads, and there was a monument called Bately Bats next to the complex that had stone carvings of bats at the top of the structure and a well with running water that flowed beneath the crossroads. Bob seemed to become an entirely different type of person at Batley than he had been in his more minimal environment on Lupset Estate. My perception of him shifted dramatically, but so it seemed did that of several other people too who now seemed to enter the environment with an admixture of immediate trepidation and scepticism. He had become the archetypal artist.

 

Written in chalk on a blackboard above the junk cluttered desk were the words, “Art is not the object, but freedom”. Moving from one side of the room to the other was an arduous task. There were boxes and books and items of jewellery and tools and paintings strewn across the floor. There were no empty spaces at all, and the Asians would come in and walk right over his paintings with their big heavy black boots, and I thought it seemed disrespectful to me, but Bob didn’t seem to mind this. I would score cannabis and pills from the Asians. I was often quiet, speaking seemed difficult for me, once Bob said sarcastically, “This will make an interesting novel, people sitting around and saying nothing”. I seemed to be infectious. I could silence a room.

 

One night I went to Bob’s flat with Jib’s brother. It was a seven mile bus ride from Wakefield and we took a pill each and Jib’s brother and I sat on the sofa and we were given art books to look through. They seemed big heavy thick tomes that one could never find on a bookshelf in a store, and they were interpreted as amazing by me because they were artists I’d never heard of before and I could see scenes of depicted historical events that seemed to cover a thousand years, a kind of people’s art, and the images would unfold and come to life, like I was watching a kind of television of history, and the artists may not have been technically great, but were humans who had a story to tell. Bob lay on the floor by the fireplace with a hot water bottle over his eye. He’d said he had an eye pain, a recurrent problem, and the water bottle seemed to help, though he wasn’t sure why. He was quiet for hours as Jib’s brother and I chatted about the images. Twice Jib’s brother kicked Bob hard in his legs which were stretched out along the rug and the last time Bob seemed to make a noise of disgruntlement and discontent and I thought it was rude and clumsy of Jib’s brother, and I hoped to God he didn’t think it was me, Bob had his eyes closed.  

 

Amongst Bob’s own collection of artwork he had painted a man wearing a large straw hat and spectacles. One of the lenses was heavily shaded so that one could only see one of the portrait’s eyes. Once Bob hammered a nail hard into a wooden board that he’d collaged and painted in his re-mixed media style, and Dave who co-owned the mill said, “You can tell it’s not fine art”.   

 

We were sitting in a circle of people one night and a man I didn’t know was sitting in the chair to the side of me and I sat and rolled joints, it was something to do with my hands whilst I was nervous. Twice the man kicked me when he changed his seating posture so they appeared to be accidents, but they weren’t accidents. I was a little perplexed and perturbed, but I remained passive without words. Later, when he had gone, Bob said, “I never met him before, he didn’t say very much”, and later still Bob said, “The reason people take advantage of you is because you’re under confident”.  

 

Bob was often saying “Leeds is a great place”, and Bob, Russ, and I went to Back to Basics Mint Bar in Leeds one afternoon. Bob was a great old friend of the owners; he’d been there when the idea of Basics had first been proposed. The name of the club had been inspired by a John Major speech, “We have to get back to basics”, I had remembered watching the speech on television after school. The nightclub was situated on one side of the road, and the café-wine-bar was situated on the opposite side. We sat for several hours behind a table until I was bored beyond belief. Russ said, “Dave created this place for us, don’t forget that, it’s ours, it belongs to us”. I wanted to go home. Bob was trying to imprint.   

 

It had been said that Bob and Russ were going to come over to my flat and Jib’s brother, Juliet, and I sat in the back bedroom. It was the first time Juliet had used an MDMA tablet and she was sitting on the bed with a serene and glowing countenance. I played drum n’bass music and after a while I started to sway to the music and then dance to the music and then I became some approximation of an aerobics fanatic and after several hours of keeping fit exercises I began to feel queasy and I rushed to the window to vomit, but I only managed dry-retching, I collapsed exhausted in a heap on the floor with my back propped up against the side of the second bed and I saw that there were clouds all around me and at the far end of the room where Jib’s brother had been sitting I saw God enthroned with angels standing at either side of him, my eyes were rolling and I thought I was in heaven.

 

The day before I had chalked symbols across the walls of the room and I climbed up onto the bed and felt myself rushing at great speeds through a universe of symbols which zipped past me and away. Sometime later when the effects had worn off, Jib’s brother said in his best impression of a depressive individual, “Nothing like that ever happens to me”.  

 

I thought Bob and Russ weren’t going to show and I was physically knackered in extremis, and so I got into bed with Juliet. We were fully clothed and weren’t sleeping, but the doorbell buzzed after three in the morning and nobody wanted to get up and answer. I left the two of them standing at the door outside for around twenty minutes, but the bell continued to buzz and I reluctantly got up and let them in.

 

I had recently repainted the room so that the back wall had become three alternate blue lined stripes; the wall in front had become bright orange. Bob and Russ sat on the wicker chair that had been re-situated on a diagonal axis in the middle of the room and some of my paintings were propped up in front of the two of them. One image painted on canvas was a cartoon self-portrait who was posing with a paintbrush after having graffitied the wall with a design that looked like a kind of chainsaw-mangler that the artist was being processed through. It was a kind of symbolical death I believed, but came unconsciously perhaps from associations of my grandfather having lost part of his thumb and index finger with a chainsaw.  

 

I slept with my arm around Juliet, but this wasn’t a romantic gesture. It seemed to be a message of possession. In the morning I stood in front of the window and raised my arms high, like a letter Y-shape, and the two blue love birds perched on top of the curtain rail whisked around the room with chirping sounds and after a complete circumambulation nestled back on the railing. Bob paused before leaving the room and he gave me a prolonged evil glare.  

 

I stayed at my sister’s house for two weeks when I let the flat go, but it was unbearable, one couldn’t put a coffee mug down, even for a minute without her becoming a tyrant. She ran the home like the dictator of a small country, and Bob said I could stay at his if I wanted.

 

Russ and I pulled up in his mother’s jeep and my boxes of belongings consisting of clothes, and books, and video cassettes, and my own artwork, were in the back of the vehicle. I could see Bob’s visage in the rear view mirror as he stood behind us looking at the boxes and he didn’t seem very happy. I was instantaneously unnerved. It was a very uncertain time for me, and I immediately wanted to leave, but I seemed to have nowhere to leave to. There was space made for my belongings in a small cupboard in the upstairs bedroom.

 

After a few days I was sitting on the sofa and Bob was standing by the living room entrance. Above the door in large bulky gold metal letters was the word L-I-F-E. He’d previously had the word displayed in the window, but the Asians in town were beginning to talk and it seemed a little too eccentric for them so Bob moved them inside.

 

Bob took a single step so that he crossed the border from one side of the doorway to the other and just as he moved a letter E came crashing down and landed with a deep dull thud sound on the wooden floor. I was shocked. He could have died! What would I have done if the letter had hit him on the head and he’d been laying there in a pool of blood?! Bob smiled and joked, “The irony that would have been, Bob B killed by an E!” He seemed to find this funny, but I was still in shock, and thinking how can you joke like that?!

 

We listened to DJ Shadow, and Roni Size, and Money Mark, and Coldcuts albums, Bob said, “Ninja Tunes are a really good label to listen to”.

 

I had joined an employment agency called Manpower whilst staying briefly at my sister’s house, and initially they had me working nights at a printing factory off Low Laithes where the chimney stack was, but after a week of taping plastic boards together, I was switched by the agency to working dayshift in a margarine factory located in Ossett. It was a peculiar thing for me, because I had to pass very close to where my father and his family lived, once in the morning, and then once in the evening. I never stopped by to say “Hello”. I believed I was undergoing a shamanic initiation.  

 

Bob said the previous night and in the morning before I had left for the bus to work that he would cook dinner for us for when I arrived back at his flat in the evening. I had completed an exhausting day of tedious labour, and the bus journey took hours, and when I arrived back at the mill complex and knocked at the downstairs door there was nobody in and I was left standing outside for over half an hour not knowing what was happening. On the window sill, next to the front door were words cut out of rusty metal, “RUST IN PIECES”.

 

Dave who co-owned the mill showed up and said that Bob was out, “he was busy”, but that I could stay at his for the night, and “we’ll order pizza”. In Dave’s room I could see Bob had chalked across the walls, Dave said, “You should let Bob be the artist,” and I said, “I was creating artwork before I met Bob” and Dave said, “Oh!” We smoked marijuana and Dave said, “I’m not into homosexuality, but Bob doesn’t mind that kind of thing”, and I said, “I don’t mind homosexuals”, but I didn’t mean it like that, and Dave said, “Oh!” I wondered if this meant Dave was trying to tell me Bob was homosexual and I wondered if that mean Russ was too. Russ was younger than me. Dave gave me money to buy pizza for the both of us from across the road, and he said, “Tell the owner that if it’s not right, there will be trouble, tell him Dave said so”, and I went across the road to the pizza place and I repeated what Dave had said, and this tough Asian dude was staring back at me and he didn’t take it as a joke and he didn’t laugh and he was looking quite threatening like I might be in trouble and when I got back with the pizza Dave said to me, “You didn’t really say that to them did you?” and, “I’m gonna have to go down now and sort that out now”. It appeared that I’d made a mistake.

 

At the factory the concrete floors were washed with hosepipes which left several inches of water one had to wade through and consequently this meant that every now and again one would slip and fall. Once, I badly bruised my elbow, another time the back of my head, people would find this riotously funny. My specific job role was to scoop margarine from plastic tubs and dump the substance into large boiling hot vats.  An old lady I had worked with for a week said, “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it after a while,” and I asked “how long have you been doing this?” and she said, “fifteen years”, and she smiled, but she had no teeth, and I knew I was going to quit the job.

 

I told Bob the following evening I had quit. I had set out in the morning as though I was going to work, but instead I had gone into Wakefield and hung out in town for the day and Bob was very angry with me when I got back to the flat, “Oh, why did you do that Justin?!”

 

People seemed so happy in wretched jobs and the pay was unbelievably low, just a hundred and twenty five pounds per week! The agency took a mammoth share of what would have been earnings and I learned about taxes. Bob seemed a real stress. I would get very few hours’ sleep. It wasn’t a happy time; he would say things like, “I really like Juliet’s boots”. I hated her boots, they looked ugly. I hated Leeds too.  

 

Once Bob stood in front of the fireplace, raised his arms above his head and said, “I want to rule the world!” He sounded like a movie villain to me and I thought, he’s gone totally insane! Another time he was crouched low on his haunches in front of the armchair that I had been sitting in and he said, “I once took some pills that made my fingers disappear”, and I said, “Cool” and he said, “it gave me a bad migraine that lasted three long years”. He talked about Back to Basics and said, “It doesn’t matter what you wear just as long as you are there”.

 

We played a game with post-it notes stuck to our foreheads, Bob applied one of the yellow labels to mine making sure it was soggy with saliva and I applied one to his forehead which wasn’t. I wrote Einstein, and he guessed “Woody Allen?” I had never talked to him at all about Woody and I thought, you’re not that good. Einstein, I had chosen largely for the letter E and the meme of him I had most familiarly associated with him at the time where he had an E on his protruding tongue. Bob had once painted the words into a collage, “E’s the Key”. When my turn to guess came I asked, “Am I a woman?” and Bob said, “yes Justin, you are”. I would have never guessed Twiggy at all, or even understood what he meant by Twiggy. The Asians weren’t impressed with the game and they paced up and down, back and forth, mumbling discontent, with disgruntled looks upon their faces, and with post-it notes attached to their foreheads.

 

I found that the Asians were quicker than me, more intelligent and alert, only later did I realise they were on cocaine. I was stoned. They were different levels. They were a strong people however and superverbal, and I began to see the whites through their perception grids of the Asians with a particular haughtiness. After several months Mohammad said, “I’ve given up on you”. I was too laconic, I had found speaking difficult. It was my fault.

 

I had created a bulky book that was filled with paintings, sketches, collages, and doodles. The front cover of the book was brown and there was a mask that doubled over so that one could also see the profile of a walking cat and on the first page of the book was a female’s face that I’d sketched in pencil. Inside the book was an image of a man holding his hands to his head and a bat flying above him. Bob said, “Carl Jung” and the name seemed very familiar to me because when I was younger I’d once seen a Jungian therapist for a few years, I’d sat in her house in front of her fireplace in an armchair and talked across to her as she sat in her armchair and she listened and when my hour was up I had to leave. I made a mental note of looking up Dr Jung and reading some of his books.

 

One night I came downstairs and saw that Bob and Mohammad were sitting with the book in front of them; they were turning pages and seemed deep in discussion. I’m not sure what they were saying, but I said, “It’s what they want us to do”. 

 

I sat across from Bob while we were alone and I asked him, “Am I a Shaman Bob?” and Bob quarter smiled and looked at my T-shirt which was light blue with blue-lined stripes running through the centre and around the collar and sleeves and he said, “that’s a really good T-shirt you’re wearing” and I looked down to see what I was wearing, but I wasn’t sure what this was supposed to mean.

 

One day I said to him, “Although it may not seem so now, at some point in the future it will come through the system…” I was gesticulating with my arms as though I may have meant through the walls “… to tell you that it’s really me”, and Bob was sat staring at me, and I felt all nervous and insecure again and then I popped my head back through the waters and reasserted my claim. He continued to stare at me and I internally collapsed again.

 

Once I said “David Bowie had based his character Ziggy Stardust on a schizophrenic”, this was something I had picked up from a magazine. Bob sat on the sofa and listened.

 

Once I seem to recall I was introduced to a man who claimed that because of David Bowie he had wound up homeless and in prison and I remember thinking this is absurd, a rock singer can’t do that.

 

I would have very little sleep at Bobs. It had been said by others that Bob never slept, when I said, “he’s been awake for five days” I was told, “only five days?” The natural circadian recuperation phase seemed to be regarded for wimps. I was tired and ruined with dysrhythmia. I came downstairs and sat on the living room sofa for four mornings running and I noticed that on the top of the bookshelf there was a copy of Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws. I pointed up to the novel and said, “I bet that’s a really s**t novel” and Bob stared through me like I was the most ignorant person in the world. On the fifth morning I sat down expecting to see the book and when I looked up it had gone. 

 

In the evening Bob and I were alone and I fished out an MDMA pill that had been in the small pocket of the jeans I had worn, which had been there since my 21^st birthday. Bob seemed surprised that I even had a pill, “what that’s been there the whole time?” he asked, “Yeah”, I said. I swallowed the Mitsubishi branded pill that had the three diamond logo printed onto its face, like one sees on the Mitsubishi cars, and shortly afterwards I asked if Bob could play some music. He seemed reluctant at first, “you know I’ve taken a pill?”, I said, and he nodded and rooted for a CD that he then slotted into the machine and we listened to some synthetic ethereal spiritual s**t.

 

A few days earlier I’d heard Russ saying that Bob was telepathic and I was sitting sat on the sofa, Bob was on the floor next to me and I thought I would test this theory. Without spoken words I said to Bob, can you show me something, like a book perhaps, I was thinking, something of great knowledge and wisdom? And Bob stood up and walked across the room and he took a ring binder from the shelf and brought this across to me. “This was written by a friend of mine”, he said handing me the ring binder, “You ask the book a question, and add up the numerical value of the question with this alphabet grid in the front”. He showed me the grid pointing with his finger and I could see that each letter had a correlating number. “You then look for the number of the passage”.

 

I asked the book if I was a shaman and I turned to the relevant page and passage and read, “Salvador Dali is the primary initiator”. It seemed interesting, I had been reading about Dali since been given a book whilst in high school. My own drawings had become a little bit strange and abstract I seem to recall in memory and this may have stimulated the action behaviour of introducing me to the great Dali. Browsing through the ring-binder I recall asking Bob what the words microcosm and macrocosm meant. I was ignorant, and I didn’t receive an answer.

 

At some point I put the book down and stood in the space before the sofa and I rambled on incoherently, theorising about this or that, and then I realised that I was probably full of s**t and I fell into a depression. I wanted to go home and be back with Juliet in a happier time before we argued. I had tears in my eyes and Bob said, “You should go upstairs to bed”. I ignored his advice and sat a while longer, but I felt broken inside. I remember looking at how closely shaven Bob’s white hair was and it seemed to send a shudder along my spine. I thought, he’s a Nazi. I continued my whining and Bob said, “Go to bed! I’ve never seen anyone get so high and then so low in such a short space of time before”. This time I went upstairs to the spare bedroom, and no sooner had my head touched the pillow demons began to emerge from out of the woodwork and they moved across the room toward me.

 

I seemed to be paralysed by fear and fright and my mind was racing, this cannot be, this cannot be, I was saying to myself, I would have never believed in a million years that such a thing be possible, but two of the demons were positioning their dark forms on one side of the body and two positioning on the other side and then I could feel them, like a poking and prodding sensation that seemed like that of a dull ache, similar to how it feels if one’s sensory afferents are triggered by jabbing one’s own finger into the side of one’s body. It seemed that the demons were operating on me, and I wanted them off and gone, and I fought them with all the mental reserves I had hypothesising that if they were internal and not external manifestations as logic would seem to decry then I should be able to subdue them with my mind. “Get off me, get off me, get off me,” I repeated to myself. But they continued with the careful operation and were finished when they had decided they were finished and then like a movie in rewind they retreated back across the room and into the woodwork from where they had come from.

 

Afterwards I felt completely shattered, and I fell asleep. Around four hours later I was wide awake and I made my way down the creaky wooden stairwell that was lined with paintings propped up against the wall and I walked into the living room. I saw Bob sitting by the fireplace and he was carving a wooden figurine and I said, “Demons, I’ve just seen demons”. And he looked up at me without speaking and I sat down in the armchair and I felt I must have looked as pallid as if I’d seen a ghost and he placed the figurine on the cluttered coffee table and he stood up and left the room for maybe around seven or eight hours. I picked up the figurine and I found myself looking at a caricature representation of my very own facial features, and I thought how amazing this was. Bob’s art had always appeared abstract to me, and I hadn’t realised that this skill range had been available to him. I wanted to take the figurine, and hold it, and never let anyone harm it. I was sat with this little-me on my lap for several hours, and I was thinking about the events of the previous night and how this could have happened. My entire epistemology had seemed to collapse; I was sitting in the wreckage.

 

The weekend arrived within a few days and Bob and Russ and a few of the Asians went to Back to Basics whilst I stayed at a house somewhere in Bately which was an area of the town I wasn’t very familiar with. To begin with it was I, Cooper, Jib’s brother, and Mohamed, but there seemed to be a discernible underlying pressure on the white boys who didn’t seem to appear comfortable and acted nervously and after they had scored their cannabis they left for Wakefield, “are you sure you don’t want to come back with us?” Jib’s brother had said, and I said “No”, I thought they were in a retreat reflex which I modelled as weakness. I stayed in the house with Mohamed, I was sat in the armchair with the front window behind me and Mohamed played drum n’ bass music from a portable CD player. I rolled marijuana joints and smoked and around every forty minutes or so Mohamed gave me an ecstasy tablet which I obligingly swallowed. At times the music seemed evil to me, and I couldn’t stand it, and I saw that Mohamed was watching me in a way I wasn’t too sure about. He had his left hand in his trouser pocket and he fished out flashing the glint of sharp steal and I was apprehensive and nervous. Earlier in the week he had been sitting in front of me whilst I was on an ecstasy tablet and he’d said “we slice the throats of cows and drain the blood from their necks” and he performed the “you’re dead salute” by rolling his finger across his neck and I was horrified, I thought he sounded evil, “Satan is in the blood”, he had said. Then he removed the blue contacts from his eyes and for the first time in a year I saw his natural brown eye colour and it totally weirded me out. Now he was pacing back and forth with long heavy strides and he kept his hand in his pocket and I could tell that he was twirling the knife around and I was worried, he wouldn’t take his eyes from me. He was dressed entirely in black and wore a long black leather jacket, and he seemed to lurch forward and I retracted, hallucinating that he was flying at me with the knife jutting toward my face. I was both terrified and stupefied. Too scared to speak, too scared to move. He was pacing back and forth again, his hand was on the knife, he showed me the knife. I needed to get out! It was after 4 O’clock in the morning, I was miles away from home, up a steep hill somewhere I never been to before. I didn’t know Batley, I wasn’t from Batley, I was on maybe five or six pills and I regretted not going back to Wakefield with Cooper and Jib’s brother. The pressure was immense. I thought I was going to be killed.

 

Bob and the others came back from Basics. Russ was missing, and there were two unfamiliar faces I’d never seen before. I don’t think I’ve ever been as relieved to see someone as I was to see Bob that night. He sat down on the sofa and I could see that he appeared to be glowing red and there were red fiery darts radiating from his body and he raised his right hand up in the air toward me in my silence. In the background the Asians were speaking a language I didn’t understand.

 

The young man sitting to the side of Bob was talking incessantly, and he seemed lowbrow and uncouth to me, and I felt contempt for him because of this, but also because he could do that which I couldn’t do… talk. The other young man sat on the floor before the armchair that I was sitting in and he said, “Would you let me suck your c**k? Can I suck it?” and I flashed immediate spontaneous kinesic responses of total and complete repugnance. The man stood up, made some excuse and left the house. The Asians were talking about going off into the woods, where we could dance, and light a fire, and smoke weed, and I began to sense that this may be a ploy, I wasn’t convinced by the sincerity of the sales pitch and they went upstairs and changed their attire from smart and sophisticated gangster black, to scruffy and unkempt blue jeans with rips and tears along the leg and in the knee so the skin was exposed. They were ordinarily obsessed with appearance and promoted expensive high street fashion brands and I thought that maybe going off into the woods with these people wasn’t such a great idea.

 

I made some excuse to leave the room, the tension was unbearable, “I need a drink”. The kitchen was downstairs; the living room had been on the middle floor. As I stood before the kitchen sink I saw there were huge, elongated, thick, black slugs sliding across the metal basin and across the countertop. They must have been around fifteen centimetres in length and I recoiled back in horror feeling so repulsed I thought I may throw up. Then on the plastic rack one uses to dry the crockery I noticed a long sharp bread knife and I picked it up and slotted the steal down the inside slack of my chinos along the length of my thigh. Slowly and tentatively I began to walk back up the stairs toward where the others were gathered in the room. I thought I would be grabbed as I exited the stairway and turned into the room and I ran through this scenario several times so I would know how to deal with that situation if it arose. Before I rounded the corner I took in a gulp of oxygen and quickly turned into the room, and then I paced at speed with long strides across the floor to the far side where the front door was, I opened the door and turned to Bob and said, “are we going?” and Bob seemed relaxed and complacent and I said, “I need to go!” and the chatterbox who had been talking the whole time mouthed something vulgar rude and inane at me and I quickly asserted authority, putting him in his place, I was in no mood at all, Bob’s house seemed to be the only available place to walk to and I wanted him to let me in. He had the front door key. Bob reluctantly pulled himself away from the couch, but to my dismay the Asians wanted to walk down the hill with us and I felt a pang of dread. I kept several paces behind them, if they slowed down, I slowed down so the distance between them and I was never shortened. If they had turned and made a grab for me, I would have turned and ran as fast as I could, the blade would have been the very last line of defence.     

  

The Asians stopped at the crossroads across from the mill, they were going off elsewhere to someone’s house and as I walked over the road I kept my eyes locked on Mohamad’s, he was staring back at me with complete contempt and disdain. When I entered Bob’s living room I slid the knife under the clutter of the desk and it could have been lost for a thousand years had I not told. Bob and I sat down, he at one side of the room and I at the other, and I said, “I thought they were going to kill me”, and Bob shouted at me in anger, “Oh, Justin!”

 

The following day I moved into Marshway hostel, there was a room available. I’d put my name down on a waiting list three days earlier without having told anybody.

 

The next time I was at Batley the glass cabinet in his living room had been shattered, Bob had thrown an ashtray across the space toward his son that had narrowly missed his face. He complained about his son to me. I asked him, “What happened to the little-me doll” and he told me that someone had walked into the room and accidentally kicked the wooden figurine across the floor, “it had whizzed across the carpet and hit the fireplace, the leg broke off”.

 

I noticed some black dolls on the mantelpiece above the fire and I said, “They look interesting, what are they?” and Bob said, “Voodoo dolls, from Africa”.

 

Before I left Bob brought two long white sheets into the room, they looked like robes and stitched to the lower seams were the red symbols of the Templars. He placed the crosses side by side so they were doubled.

 

I’d been in the Inns of Court with Cooper and Lee and Jib and they headed off toward the bus station and I crossed Wood Street waving goodbye to them and I wasn’t looking where I was walking, I’d had a few beers to drink, and I walked straight into a red and white barrier that was supposed to prevent accidents so that people didn’t fall into the maintenance work, but I walked through the barrier and fell into the deep ditch. I was laying there at the bottom in agony, and I was making loud moaning sounds and the police came to the windows of the station and saw me and they were laughing, and one woman asked “are you okay?” and I said “yeah”, but I was in pain.

 

I clambered out of the ditch and when I stood up I brushed off my clothing and rolled the left leg of my jeans up and I saw that there was a great gaping gap that had sliced up my leg along the shin bone from the ankle to the knee. The barrier had left a sore thick red band striped across my chest.  

 

I went to see Bob soon after I had been given a green hooded Stussi top and the Asians were mocking the cliché and I sat down and closed my eyes in a kind of egoic faux spirituality and I said, “I know who I am now!”

 

In truth I was no more intellectually advanced than I had been since the last time that I had seen them and my behaviour was probably interpreted as pompous and pretentious. I was trying to hold my head above the water. I think I must have annoyed them. As I stood at the bus stop waiting for the mini bus into Wakefield Sam came outside standing by the monument and started shouting and hollering threats of violence from across the road. He was saying, “If you ever comeback down here again I’m gonna kick your head in!” and I stood there in silence staring back at him taking the abuse until the mini bus intervened and I hopped on board and got out of that town, only going back six months later to pick up my boxes that I had left in the small cupboard, my mother was sat in her green BMW parked in the driveway and Bob had said, “Look how scruffy we are in comparison to your mother”.