waffus got yer?

We wake up in different parts of the town but we don’t acknowledge the separation. Growing apart from friends and even family in the same old settings. Since school your auntie and her lover grew apart, and now they live only three doors away and blank each other in the street. You used to enjoy going around to his house at weekends, he schooled you on Bristol Rovers, the real supporters team, and you learnt all the names of the players and the manager and you talked about going to the Memorial Stadium to see them play and it still inspired a feeling of love, an allure, it reminded you of what you were drawn to as a kid. But your parents never let you go anywhere on your own, they couldn’t afford it either. And after they split up your Mum said it was wrong to keep going around when her sister was so upset. He wasn’t a bad man though. And you had nothing to do at weekends after that. You were always bored bored bored, living inside your head. I was always going to car boot sales on Sundays with my dad in Cheddar and I used to get so bored too watching all the sour faced old sods pick amongst each others garbage making a bob or two just to spend on more crap, more rubbish no one needs. Little mother-of-pearl statuettes of unicorns and old broken odd remotes and car stereos trailing wires like they’d been disembowelled. And each time at the end of the day dad would come over to my little red wooden seat and ask me how my day was, and he’d call me old grumpy boots and then he’d press a quid, or fifty p, or even sometimes a quid fifty into my palm and tell me to buy whatever I wanted, just no fags he’d say with a chuckle. And then I’d run off and buy a forty p penny mix off Miss Pearce who was a big round woman with a long nose and bendy lips who always made me feel ashamed whenever I went to her stall but always gave me an extra chocolate mouse because she knew me, knew me dad. Then I’d run off and look for something to tickle my fancy; I bought action figures of Spiderman and Batman and the Turtles and X-Men and playing cards and trump cards and old yellowing dog-eared comics. Then I’d bring whatever I got into school and me and my little mates would play together in the playground, on the gravel tarmac with all those painted lines that we never used, only wrongly as boxes for British Bulldog or cops and robbers. But you never played with us, we were too rough and we never gave you the time of day because of it. You just used to sit and watch everybody all on your own, and you never had anything, no toys, no books or pens or pencils, but you never looked unhappy, I never saw you sad, you just watched. You looked at everything and took it all in. And even then I was waiting to talk to you. I didn’t know it but I was.

You went away travelling like a rover across Britain when you were sixteen, I know that much. All those ideas brimming in your dreamers head about social troubles and hopes, all those hopes you told me about when you were getting stoned in my room. I knew you were bright, you were way cleverer than I could ever hope to be. I just wanted a simple life and it all seemed to roll out ahead of me in simple terms; college, university, then a nice, steady job, a wife, maybe kids, simple pleasures, I still followed the cricket like a loon, never shared your love for Rovers, and that would be me. But you said you didn’t want a steady job earning a fat salary when so many people were wallowing in poverty, you didn’t want to be falsely happy at anyone else’s expense. So you went away to find yourself you said, to meet like-minded people because there weren’t any in this area apart from me, and I had my own life. You said you loved it here, but it would suffocate you if you let it take over. You weren’t comfortable in the bubble like me and my mates, I mean I wasn’t sure, I was kind of torn, I respected you for what you knew and believed; in equality, and that the world was basically unjust, but I unlike you I couldn’t see a way of setting things strait. I didn’t worry myself like you. But you weren’t the same when you came back. You’d darkened in those 18 months more than I could even imagine. And you only gave me snippets of what happened to you. You’d been attacked; beaten up and mugged and you had a scar on your left eyebrow, and when you blinked that one lowered slower than the right. You looked different too. You had long, unwashed hair and everyone said you were a crusty little hippy. You were skinny too, because you were a vegan by then, you worried about everything you did; you recycled, you hated wasting anything. And I just wanted you to be happy, to stop worrying and taking the whole world on your shoulders and enjoy your life. The only time I ever saw you come out of yourself was when you talked about Bristol Rovers and how badly they were doing, you used to laugh at how they consistently staggered everyone’s expectations by doing so badly. So I decided to take you up there to see a match. I knew You’d never been before and had never even considered going since you were little. I remember you changed a little when I’d shown you the tickets, just staring at them in disbelief with a sad smile on your face. And I think you’d known why I’d bought them.

You’d always written poetry about what you were thinking and feeling inside your hidden mind. The first you ever showed me was written on a torn and tattered scrap of paper, you gave it to me as a present and I still have it.

'Under the rotten Elm tree of our history,
We laugh and cry like lost children,
Aware only of the shadowed grass, because all we see,
When we look down, is the grass that should be as green,
As the same grass out and far away,
From the overarching darkness,
Cast by the rotten Elm tree of our history.'

You wrote it when you were fifteen and I wondered what you were talking about, and I still do. You were very good at history at school, much better than me. So I guessed it was just something I didn’t understand. But there was one time in my room when we were stoned, one of those countless times in the spring before we finished at secondary school when all we did was smoke and talk about home, about Somerset and how it could be better, about what we had to look forward to in our lives. You said that there was nothing to look forward to really, that for as long as there were still people in the world suffering as they were now, and the same few people had the all the money and power, there would never be a day when you would be happy there, or here, or anywhere you might go to get away from it all. But I didn’t have the resources to respond to you properly. You were so far away even before you left. But yeah, somehow, somewhere in my muddled head you got through between the cannabis resin, the blim that shot my thoughts to fuck, and I knew what you were on about almost. Because we had nothing, well, not nothing exactly, neither you nor I were poor, not like, really poor, not like starving poor. Yours had way less than mine definitely, but you got by, you never starved. But even then I felt like something had gone terribly wrong. Something was not cricket about our town, about our home. People we both knew, and still know were getting into serious trouble; fifteen year olds pregnant and the fathers not in sight; scarpered, some even on the game in Bristol, like Haley Witherall, withered smack-addict features even before she was sixteen. That was before you left. And then there were the fights, fights outside clubs, around the estates, vendetta beatings, gang beatings, muggings; it all seemed to be happening more and more. And then there was Trim, Martin Trimmer, my old best mate. That tore me up more than anything. Selling himself to grimey fogies, to twisted old men in their huge Bims, Mercs, a sliding scale, how far will you go for happiness, a slippery slope, just for a pocketful of cash, just to keep going. All just to buy some new trash, some brand spanking new rubbish; stereos, CDs, DVDs, keeping up to date with all the luxuries of the modern world. I had to get you to drive me over to Bristol after you told me about him. I wouldn’t believe you. You said I had to see it. You said I had to know. That I should be aware of what other people just like me were doing. Trim was just like me. And there he was, just like you told me. We watched him from a distance as he sat there on that broken bench, on that dirty throne, and I knew you were right. You said we don’t have to watch anymore, you pushed at me to leave. But I had to stay. I had to be sure. Then a Bimmer pulled up, and the window wound down, slowly, then Trim stood up, got in, agh no…

You said it was because of poverty. You said the bloke in the Bim was rich, and Trim was poor, and he only had his body to sell. Because Trim didn’t stand much chance of getting far in the world, breaking into a carear seemed off his scale, too far out of his boundaries. I try to remember him when he was little, and we played and ran and didn’t have to think about money, and having loads of stuff to impress the right people, of being poor and rich, cool and twatish, fit and minging, interesting and boring, smart and thick-as-shit. He was just another kid, and we got on, it was as simple as that. I never knew what would become of him, something good I hoped. But he now, a rent boy, for sale, a victim set and paid for by rats and snakes for dirty old men to bend and buckle and play with. Old men and younger, on their way home from work; fathers, grandfathers, bosses, decent blokes, loving husbands, loners, shadowy figures, ne’r-do-wells, dodgy geezers, players, Sunday-league-footballers. Trim was their little extra treat now, their little flutter every now an again. And at the end of the day, Trim needed the dough. So you taught me that there was a horrible part, a filled and dirty burning heart behind all of the riches that I subconsciously believed was so evenly spread in our homelands, our heartlands. And you never liked it when I talked about my rich friends because you said they were so guilty and so self-righteous in their guilt. And most of my friends then, and now for that matter, you would consider rich. I got a little defensive about it at first and told you to not be so judgemental, that it wasn’t like they could do anything about how much their parents earned. But I soon realised these people were part of your bane, the people that angered you more than anyone, more than American CEOs or the Saudi Royal Family or corrupt aid agencies in Africa; all the corruption around the world and the guilty ones right there on your doorstep hurt you more, because they were close, they were intimate, like you, your people, they were Somerset, they were Bristol, they were even Rovers some of them. So you decided to leave me with them. You only told me you were leaving, but nobody else. There is nothing here for me. Almost pleading with me to give you another reason, an answer, that things weren’t really that bad. But I couldn’t argue. Couldn’t give you the props to make you trust in the virtues of our heartlands. That was it. After school you were gone.

They certainly did make you pay for your yearning. And the darkness from the disappointment never fully left you. What really happened while you were away I know wasn’t exactly about what you did, but what went through your head. And your mum burnt your notebooks. She looked so stone cold and almost stoic when she told me. ‘Burnt?’ I couldn’t believe her callousness. ‘But did you read them?’ She’d read every last page. Staring at me with hard remorseless eyes. ‘Did he say why?’ She wasn’t going to tell me anything. She’d read horrible words, weird words. You weren’t going to tell me anything more. So all I had was that last football match. It was dreary and bleak I remember thinking, but you were in such a good mood, so bouncy and having a real laugh. And I even managed to wrangle you into having a couple of pints with me at the stadium bar beforehand, and twisted your arm into buying one more for the terraces. We were drunk and all we could talk about was how Rovers better do well. Never said why, it was just obvious, they better do well. It was a wicked game though, end-to-end stuff. And guess what, Rovers fucking lost! Ha! They crashed after giving it everything they had in the kitty. But they’d come close to winning. The others were at the top of the league so we didn’t have much hope anyway. It wasn’t a defeat at all. You loved it, and I loved it. I thought you were happy enough. Just to get by like. That maybe you’d come to terms, done your time like. But then I didn’t hear from you for a while, and then the news broke out and I had to hear it from the papers. Your mum didn’t even think to call your one friend. You disappointed her. It’s obvious. She never thought she’d have a sensitive, bright, but ever depressed son on her hands. She didn’t have the first idea about you did she? So you pushed yourself finally over that sharp edge, tied to that old door frame, which broke a while after you stopped breathing, broke under your weight and let you topple lifeless to the kitchen floor and then buried you as the house started to tumble and collapse after you, half of the house came down after you. That made me smile at least. You brought the bleeding house down mate! It was a load bearing wall, and rotten to the core, damp and every last brick laid completely incompetently. But you left me wondering mate, and it’s as much as I can bear to not know what was really wrong with you. Whether you were actually ill like some people said afterwards, or you were just more alert, tuned into the self-destruction that surrounded us, surrounds me. But I don’t know what else to say. I’m waiting mate, I think of you everyday in some capacity, I see you opening your eyes deep under the earth, a box of bones rattling as you wake up, you finally wake up and you rage against the world, not just lay yourself as a sacrifice. And I wake up from dreams where you tell me why you’re gone and imagine the ground shaking in the cemetery. On the other side of town. Far away from my beautiful home, my wife slumbering next to me, my kid next door. And I know it’s wrong, something must be wrong; you deserved so much more.