Swan Songs, page 22
I took refuge in the relative safety of my room, slumped on the rough beige carpet against the unpainted MDF half wall at the top of the staircase. Which is where I remained for a few solitary hours, hidden from any flying threats that may have passed the window and peered in. You can never be too careful when it comes to the unknown, and I was taking no chances.
My heart rate had returned to its usual 79bpm, but each beat punched against my chest as though it had a point to prove, like if I expected it to slave away, pumping all that blood around, it was going to make sure I felt it.
At some point the orange hue of the street light bled in through the window. The leafy branches swaying in the sickeningly gentle breeze of the night cast flickering shadows across the sloping wall over my head.
I watched as abstract patterns jumped all about, legs stretched out in front of me, stuck in looping fluctuations of panic and calm. Once I had managed to force a successful yawn, a warm wave of serenity washed over me, only for it to recede and leave me in the cold. My fists thumped against my thighs heteronomously, as though the panic looming over me had assumed control, pulling up and down on my marionette cross. If I was unable to gulp up that next satisfactory bubble of air when I did, I would have surely suffocated in that atmosphere.
Or at least that is what I believed at the time. Many years later I would learn that I was having an extreme panic attack for reasons I still don’t understand. But at that moment, I had zero knowledge of such a thing, which was probably for the best. Had I known what a panic attack was, I believe my reaction would have been to combat it with reckless abandon. I would have thought it made me weak and felt the need to immediately prove myself, flinging my body into harm’s way in a spontaneous, uneducated attempt to convince my nonexistent audience I was not, as Big Macca would have put it, a fucking pussy!
I hadn’t heard the door open, so I was unaware of Jay’s triumphant return until he bumped into the wall at the bottom of the stairs to my bedroom. “Argh, fuck,” he grumbled in the dark. “You up there Lee-oh-Nard?” For whatever reason, Jay had broken my name down into three syllables: Lee-oh-Nard. To this day I don’t know if he was joking or that’s just how he read my name but I never corrected him. No one else ever corrected him either, at least not in my presence.
I sprung to life in the darkness. “Yeah,” I answered. Jay flicked the light on and made his way up. My legs began to fill with blood until they were operational, clicking like a radiator heating up as I rose to my feet.
Once he cleaned the top step he took it upon himself to switch on the light.
“Alright mate,” he said, in his slow drawl. Sometimes it sounded like Jay was speaking entirely through his nose and you’d be forgiven for thinking he was stupid. His voice alone was a polarising characteristic, it would either frustrate you into madness or instantly calm you, for me it was the latter.
He did not possess a soothing aura by any stretch of the imagination, far from it. I was very aware of his frustratingly slow way of speaking. I often found myself disappearing into my own head when he spoke at any great length. But he was so fucking mental it made me feel somewhat normal, which in turn would calm me. Sometimes, in his presence, I felt almost too normal even, like I had a lot more in common with the average square than I had ever previously been willing to admit.
He walked over to me and shoved a Pioneer DJM-800 mixer into my chest. “Here,” he said.
I looked down at it. “Whoa,” I gasped, impressed with the fine piece of equipment.
“£50,” he declared and held his upturned palm out in front of me.
“Err, shit, well, I’d have to go to the cash machine like, I’ll go tomorrow.”
“No problem,” he responded.
And then he took the mixer back and walked off down the stairs with it, whistling to himself. I was somewhat confused by his reaction and at first I thought he was joking. Then I realised he wasn’t.
“I’ll defo take it man,” I reassured him.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said without looking back, “no problem mate, just get me the money tomorrow, good night.”
“Err, yeah sound laa,” I muttered from the top of the stairs, “What the fuck.”
Jay had many quirks and strange habits and that was one of them — owing him money was a mistake those that knew him best did not make. He required every penny back. Even if he chucked you 50p, he must receive it back and it had to be the second he asked. If you didn’t, he would simply remain in your presence and not say anything until you found 50p. Unfortunately for me, there was no couch in the flat to forage in, so when I found myself in debt to him for no more than 50p, he stood over me in silence while I sat at the table in my room, quietly writing.
In his head, the mixer had to remain with him until the transaction was complete. “It just stops any unnecessary problems,” he once explained without prompting. It’s just the way Jay was and probably still is, I imagine.
The next day I took a walk to the nearest cash machine, which was in a petrol station — a five-minute walk in a straight line. For some reason, walking in straight lines felt a lot easier in Liverpool than it did in London. I withdrew £80: £50 for Jay, £20 for a bag of weed and £10 for skins and food. I had plenty of tobacco as I had quit smoking cigarettes the day before and was stubborn enough to stick to it.
I returned to hand Jay the £50 in exchange for the DJ mixer. The afternoon had only just begun and he was already drunk, tipping a bottle of vodka into his mouth. Wide-eyed and leary. “Yeah!” he slowly shouted at me as I slapped two twenties and a tenner into his sweaty palm. It was hard to tell if he was angry or happy or angry because he was happy. Before he changed his mind, I retreated to my room with the DJ mixer.
Just as I plugged it in, the doorbell rang, “Shit! The weed man,” I said to myself and ran down to answer the door. I invited him in and we loitered in the hallway outside Jay’s bedroom, discussing all manner of stereotypical stoner malarkey.
Whether they were of a more bohemian persuasion or just everyday tracksuit-clad scallies; the good thing about weed dealers in those days was, they were willing to entertain any and all theories of conspiracy, no matter how far-fetched. They often believed in several vastly conflicting conspiracy theories simultaneously.
With that knowledge, I used the time to discuss the blurry-faced green bastards at length. He seemed to believe me and appeared to have some vague knowledge of what I was talking about. “I know yeah lad,” he said and intermittently butted in to add things like “That’s fucked up lad!” and “Corporations are so fucked lad!”, etc.
When it was his turn to fill me on his latest conspiratorial learnings, he dove right into the deep end head first and without taking a breath, declared how it was now known, without a shadow of a doubt, that cannabis can cure death!
“No way?” I said.
“It’s a fact lad, they’ve been doing it for centuries in secret!” And somehow he concluded his fact based tale of cannabinoid based resurrection with “And that’s why we shouldn’t pay taxes lad!”
“Oh yeah,” I agreed.
And he answered a phone call from his next impatient customer. “Where are you?” I could hear the desperate voice on the phone enquire. “Five minutes lad,” the weed man lied. Then he left.
An eerie silence had fallen upon Jay’s quarters. I contemplated taking a peek inside but you could never be sure as to how he would react to anything. I pressed my ear up against his door and could hear his quiet, struggling snores.
Jay was an avid drinker and sleeper. He could sleep through a drunken brawl that he started, just lie down right there in the middle of the melee and get a solid eight in. I left him to it and went upstairs to finish setting up the mixer and ponder immortality.
Album Finished?
At some point, I felt as though the greatest album this side of almost sane was actually almost finished. The rough tracklist was scribbled out across several post-it notes stuck to the side of the dining table. I even made some cover art with the help of Jay and his cousin’s digital camera. A blurry picture of me standing at the back of a double-decker bus, holding a Tascam Portastudio 414 MKII 4-Track I owned and had barely ever used. I would stare at the cover on the computer screen and make mental notes while listening through the album, smoking badly-rolled spliffs.
The biggest hurdle at that point was my fluctuating opinion of the music. My self-criticism and its harshness depended entirely on how stoned I was. At the start of the day I was optimistic and nodding my head enthusiastically. By the evening I was picking it apart and re-recording verses so they sounded less or more energetic, depending on the song. This cyclical prison I had built for myself sparked a never-ending debate in my head. Which opinion was my real opinion? Very stoned, or mildly stoned? A simple thinker may be inclined to believe the latter would be closer to the real self, but I was unconvinced. The only way to truly know would be to remain stone-sober for an extended period of time and then see how I felt about it. Of course, I, like you, am aware of the ludicrous nature of such a naive thought.
Eventually the very stoned and mildly stoned versions of myself would be forced into some sort of unspoken compromise. I turned away from the computer, “finished!”
Finally! Seventeen tracks, recorded, produced, mixed and mastered by yours truly. The words mixed and mastered are used very loosely, of course, but when comparing the tracks with other people’s stuff, I decided it wasn’t the absolute worst I’d heard. “Fuck it, it had its own charm!” I told my mildly stoned self, who actually disagreed but couldn’t deny the fact that there was no other way. We couldn’t leave this up to someone else to mix, they would ruin it even further! Also, we had no money to bring such fantasies to life anyway. The best thing to do then was to let the project simmer, sit on it for a while and come back to it a couple of weeks or so later. So I turned the computer off for the first time in weeks and let my mind wander elsewhere.
A night or so later, I returned from the off licence dangling a loaf of bread and drinking a can of lager. I ate toast and skimmed through a week-old copy of the Daily Mirror. My quiet reading was suddenly cut short by a loud cry with a chaser of bangs and crashes. “What the fuck,” I mumbled as I rose nonchalantly from the dining table. Approaching the top of the stairs, I could hear Jay laughing like a crazed Nicolas Cage character in a movie only I seemed to be a fan of. “No! No!” he shouted between laughs. Another loud bang, boom, crash, the sound of smashing glass. I crept down the stairs and peered through Jay’s door, which was hanging off its hinges.
“Whoa, what are you doing man?” I shouted in through the gap.
“No!” he replied. “Nooo!!” he screeched again and laughed with red eyes.
“No what?” I asked him.
“Nooo!!” he screamed again, spit bubbling from his tightly pursed lips, gritting his teeth, blood dripping from somewhere under his beanie. Without warning, he flung himself into the built-in wardrobe, sending what remained of it tumbling down on top of him. He rose from the rubble with his head cocked back, holding an empty vodka bottle upside down over his mouth, slapping the bottom of it like a bottle of ketchup. “No!” His desperate roar morphed into a manic cackle as he proceeded to club himself over the head with the bottle. Unlike the movies, the bottle did not smash, however it did appear to momentarily incapacitate him. His face turned blank, he began swaying then fell, landing face-first onto piles of protruding pieces of chipboard and wood.
His bedroom door fell into his room as I pushed it. What little Jay had was now in pieces and strewn across his tiny room. Bemused, I looked around at the aftermath.
“Err, you alright mate?” I asked, still looking around the room at the damage.
Somehow he managed to find his feet. He wiped the blood from his eyes and rubbed it into his T-shirt. “Yes!” he answered angrily.
He pushed past me and stumbled toward the kitchen, leaving a gallery of smudged claret handprints on the walls of the hallway. I tailed him from a safe distance, excited to see what he did next. With the kitchen window pushed open and resting on his shoulders, he dropped backwards like a scuba diver, landing with a heavy thud onto the flat roof below. A series of strange and painful noises left his body as he made his way to the edge of the roof. “Yeah, be careful there mate,” I tried to warn him but he lost his balance and tumbled forwards. “Ooh,” I said and sucked air between my teeth. I could hear him land on top of the wheelie bins in the alleyway. Unfortunately for Jay, they had not been conveniently loaded with bin bags full of pillows and even if they had, the lids were closed anyway. I couldn’t see over the edge from inside the kitchen but the pain was audible enough for me to imagine the rest.
Except for a dog barking somewhere in the distance, and the ambience of the road on the opposite side of the building, it fell quiet. “Jay? You OK mate?” I shouted, holding back laughter.
“Yes! Yeesss!” he finally shouted back. The alleyway gate scraped across the stone floor as he pulled it open and I could see him as he emerged on the other side. I watched in disbelief as he took surprisingly steady strides down the road and out of sight.
“Well, fucking hell!” I think I said, admiring his durability.
With the entertainment over, I stared out of my bedroom window and drank beer and smoked weed and vice versa. I imagined my eyes appeared vagrant as I soberly watched the clouds scatter and reform. Sometime later I heard Jay return but left him to clean up his mess, hammering away into the night.
The next day I ventured down to ask him what drugs or demons were to be held accountable for… for whatever that was, but he was nowhere to be seen. His door had been replaced with the one from the spare room, his wardrobe was now open-plan and the chair/bedside table had either been put back together with expert craftsmanship or had somehow managed to survive unscathed. Surprisingly, the room was pretty much OK, except the mattress was now without bedding, exposing what I suspected to be a large blood stain. Judging by the greying colour of the stain, it wasn’t fresh enough to be from the previous night’s show. If it was blood, it was more than likely evidence of a previous mental breakdown. “Hmm,” I stroked at my chin like a murder detective, “Yes.”
The orange street lights filled my room as I sat in the glow of the inaudible TV. Eyes fixed in deep concentration, exhaling smoke rings of varying quality, attempting to poke a finger in and out of the hoops without breaking them.
Suddenly I could hear a girl’s voice, my head twisted sharply, causing my neck to pull. “Argh!” I cried. “Lee-oh-Nard!” shouted Jay. “You up there?” he asked, then began speaking incoherently to the owner of the girl’s voice who giggled at whatever he said.
“Yea!” I shouted back, coughing and rubbing at my neck as I stumbled to turn on the light. “What’s happenin’?”
“Not much lad, you decent? Can we come up?” Jay responded.
“Yeah man, err, yeah,” I said, shuffling around the room in a feeble attempt to present myself as respectable. The girl giggled some more as they walked up.
“Lee-oh-Nard, Lee-argh, Lee-argh, Lee-oh-Nard,” he said, “right, I’ll leave youse to it then.” And he slapped his hands together and rubbed them as he disappeared back down the stairs to his room.
“Err,” I said, my bloodshot eyes squinting hopelessly as I struggled to find any words worth saying.
“It’s Leia by the way, like Princess Leia, not ‘Lee-Argh’,” the giggling girl said with a soft, scouse accent.
“Oh, err, yeah, my names Leonard, or Len or whatever, not ‘Lee-oh-Nard’,” I explained, unable to maintain eye contact with the pretty, painted face in front of me for longer than a fleeting second.
“Are you going west?” she said and her giggling was making me even more anxious. I tried to act like everything was completely normal.
“Err, no, yeah, nah, why?” I managed to force out, over-thinking my every movement.
“You’re acting like you weren’t expecting me or something? Am I not as pretty as my photo?” she answered and asked while taking a seat on the mattress in front of me. I wasn’t ready for a question to be fired back at me and became obsessed with what my hands were doing. Suddenly I felt like an uninvited guest in my own luxury studio/bedroom, like maybe I should have asked her for permission to sit down or something.
“Err,” I tried to smoke the spliff in my hand, which had gone out, then fumbled for a lighter.
“Looking for this?” she said, holding my lighter up.
“Yes, err, yeah,” I said, correcting my abrupt yes to a more formal yeah, so she knew everything was fine.
I lit the spliff and took a brave if not irresponsible drag, glancing down at the girl.
“Sit down,” she said, patting the mattress next to her. I robotically complied, parking myself next to her. “You going to give me a pull?”
“Yeah, err, go ’ed,” I said, passing her the spliff.
She exhaled and looked at me. “So?” she said and shrugged and waited. I tried to muster up some semblance of rational thought but the confusion made me slack-jawed and stupid. Either English was no longer my first language or I had been tagged into the life of a different Leonard Swanson. Maybe they thought my hands were capable enough to handle such a scenario, but they forgot to equip me with the memories required to understand who she was and what she was doing there in Leonard’s room. I pondered, ignoring my reality. “God, am I too fat or something? I look the same as I do in me photo, don’t I?” She finally stopped giggling.
“What?” I said, even though I heard her. By “what” I meant please elaborate, who are you and what are you doing here, etc., but I just couldn’t decide on the right combination of words. In hindsight, to answer her question, no she wasn’t fat, slightly chubby maybe, with large breasts that looked even larger due to her short stature, but I wouldn’t say fat, or maybe she was, I don’t know. Who made me the gatekeeper of body-types? Suddenly the last of my brain power kicked in.
