15-ish (Ages of David, Part 3 of 8)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Someone’s parents have made the mistake of going out for a Saturday evening so we’ve all descended on their house, clutching our four packs of cheap lager, our plastic bottles of cider and maybe a half bottle of supermarket brand spirits.  Dad’s expensive stereo has been co-opted, all the levels cranked up the maximum to force the music to rattle the windows in their frames.  We’d go to the pub, but it’s both a touch too expensive for serious drinking and there are those who find it harder than others to get served.

The August night is hot in a way that life will never seem to be again.  The return to school is still far enough away to be abstract, but inertia has begun to settle in.  All those plans of doing something useful, something creative over the holidays have dissipated into a cycle of unconstructive hanging out, drinking too late and sleeping in until almost afternoon.

Just before midnight and I’m drinking gin and woodpecker cider, talking in a slightly incoherent fashion.  With a girl.  Drunkenness and nerves make my conversation veer around wildly in a way which I hope seems eccentrically interesting but probably is just as weird as my drink choice.  Not a choice really, but a necessity having drunk all the Guinness I arrived with.

‘I need to go,’ the girl says as it trips from Saturday to Sunday.  ‘Dad will go spare if I’m not back by twelve thirty.’ 

Half an hour is more than sufficient for her to get home.  I’m pretty certain she lives about two streets across.  My brain makes some leaps and despite it being perfectly safe to be out of the suburban roads alone I say, proper gentlemanly like: ‘I’ll walk you back.  If you like.’

She nods and stands up from the dusty grass.

I follow.

The night is so warm that I’m not wearing my long grey trenchcoat.  Normally I persist with it all year round, like armour.  Without it I feel exposed.  It’s both thrilling and disconcerting.  We talk about inconsequential things.  About Bowie.  About books.  I try to show off by making stuff up that sounds unusual but not completely darkish, although I’m stealing it off other writers.  I’m desperate to appear different.  I want to be the same.

Standing just along from her front door, up close to the high bushes and clear of the streetlight so we’ll be unobserved should anyone glance out of the window, the conversation lapses.  I’ve rehearsed this a moment in my mind a million times.  Not necessarily with this girl.  The face has always been interchangeable.  But this is the first time I’ve actually got.  It’s unmarked territory.  I know where I want to go, but not how to get there.

Eventually I feel obliged to do something.  I lean down.  She’s much shorter so the definite tilt of her head back is a sure sign and my confidence is fuelled through to the point where our lips meet. 

And they part, willingly but with just enough resistance to make it feel a conquest.  The sweet apple and juniper fizz licks back.  A tongue flicks and I realise I am actually doing it.  I am actually kissing a girl. 

We separate and look at each, and I find myself, for the first time, truly paying attention to her.  I have never considered this particular girl in this way before.  

‘That was nice,’ she says and, still feeling confused as to how we ended up here and whether both of us genuinely think it was nice or just something we were socially conditioned to do, I lean in again, without saying a word.  This time I slip a hand behind her head, just to keep her in place a moment longer, to keep kissing her, to avoid having to talk to her.  As we move and slide across each other’s lips, readjusting our heads, I hear a little gasp of pleasure out the side of her mouth and feel unduly pleased that it’s me causing it.

This time when we part, she says: ‘I better go inside.  Will you call me?’

‘Sure,’ I shrug trying to be nonchalant, already wondering what will happen next, what will be the next first.  ‘What’s your Dad’s name?  I’ll get it out the book.’

‘We’re not in the phone book.’  She tells me the phone number.  I repeat it back to her.  She smiles and goes inside, ushering me away from the light and back to the party.

The following morning I awake in my friend’s garden, sitting in a plastic chair, my jeans covered in vomit, a lightning strike through my head.  The rest of the house is still asleep so I hose my trousers down some and let myself out the side gate, wondering how I am going to sneak past my parents in such a state.  It is only a hundred metres down the road that I remember my midnight kiss and a small bulb of pride bursts in my gut.  I feel unreasonably smug with myself until I realise I have, of course, completely forgotten her number.

It takes a couple of days to build up the courage to knock on her door, but from then she goes from being my first kiss to my first girlfriend.  Three months later she thinks that I’ve broken her heart as I leave her crying in the drizzle under a weeping willow’s arms in the park.  I feel like an utter shit and it is, perhaps, the first time I realise that there are worse hurts than those fists can produce.  Although it wouldn’t be the last and nor would it be last time I felt ashamed for it.

10-ish (Ages of David, Part 2 of 8)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two boys hold me in place, one on each arm bracing to keep me rigid.  The other boy squares up in front of me, shouting taunts in my face.  They’re laughing.  They find it funny, these boys my own age.  It’s entertainment to tease and mock the fat kid. The one who can’t run, who doesn’t know how to play football, who isn’t interested in same things they are - whatever they are.  I never could properly connect with the enthusiasms of everyone else.  At school I appeared stupid, easily distracted by the worlds inside my head, uninterested in the chalk marks on the board or the equasions and formula in the text book, illustrated to make learning engaging, I find myself being dismissive of the poor quality cartoons.  Hardly the point.

Wham.  The first punch connects with my stomach, the air floods out of my lungs and I feel tears prick against the edges of my eyes.  I don’t want to cry, I don’t want to give them the satisfaction, but it is anger and frustration as much as pain.  I don’t want to be fat.  I don’t want to know who is playing up front for Aston Villa.  I don’t want to be hit again.  I don’t want to come to school.  I’m not even sure I want to be normal.

I’m not stupid but school is boring.  I am completely disengaged from what is happening around me and I tend to be lumped with other boys who look blank when asked a question, but aren’t cool enough to overtly play it up.  I prefer looking out the window, letting the grassy slope up to the playing field transform before my imagination’s eye into something else, somewhere else.  A gangplank to a pirate’s ship, so clear I can smell the seaweed hanging from the chain holding it in moor, like salty dreams.  The base of shuttle launch site, bellows of steam rising, the heat so intense there’s a prickle of sweat in the small of my back even in the dead of winter.  Somewhere, anywhere so long as it is away.

Back at the ends of the playing field there’s another taunt about who knows what.  The hate feels real enough as though everyone that age must loath something even if there’s no real reason.  At what age do we start to understand and tolerate difference?  Why do we expect conformity? I don’t know, but these boys think they do.  I’m superficially the same as them, but there are things which don’t quite match and that makes me ripe for punishment.

So I flex.  I plant my feet firmly on the ground and tense my muscles.  With a sudden surge of strength I throw off those holding me.  A solid roundhouse fells the ringleader and his sidekicks are finished off with some swift punches.  I am triumphant.

Of course, that doesn’t happen.  That only happens in comics and TV shows, where the bullied are miraculously able to vanquish the bullies.  Everyone always says that a bully is a coward.  If you stand up to them or hit them back they run.  In my experience that doesn’t happen.  The bully hits you harder.  And then his friends join in and you find yourself in this sort of situation.

Another punch to side of my head leaves my hearing rattling.  My cheeks are wet and flushed now.  The indignity makes me wince even twenty-five years in the future.  The one boy holding me breathes heavily, as though prepubescently aroused.  It’s odd what people find normal. 

The ringleader lifts my chin up to swear in my face some more.  I haven’t completely given up though and close as he is I manage to hoik a fat green globule of spit square into his eyes.  I try to follow up with a kick to the testicles.  I miss and only catch his thigh, not hard enough to do any real harm.  I’m too held in place to get any weight behind it.

‘You are fucking dead,’ he snarls wiping the snotty spit from his eyes.  I know he means it but the disgust on his face as he looks at the mess left in his hand gives me a faint dose of joy and I smile.  Just a little bit.

His henchmen let go and the three of them lay into me.  I get a few blows out, but it’s largely ineffectual.  Only larger than life, comic-book heroes can beat more than one man at a time.  For rolly-polly weaklings, there’s no hope.  It doesn’t take long for me to be on the floor and the punches continue, but I curl up and cover my head, resigned to the end.  Their target no longer fighting back, they lose interest.  There is only fun to be had in the failing to escape, the pathetic nature of the counter-struggle.  They stop.  I glance up just in time to see the heal of the shoe coming straight in to my face.

I lie on the sunburnt grass as their cackling laughter disappears into the distance.   Most of me hurts, but that’s nothing new.  I rewind the scene in my head and I play it out again, only this time, again, I get a lucky blow in.  In my imagination, I find myself pinning the ringleader down my knees into his shoulders and I punch him again and again in the face until the skin on my knuckles cracks and my own blood mixes with the pulped mess under my hands.  Violence begates violence, but I am young and I hurt.  I deserve revenge, don’t I?

The sun is warm and slides across me as I lie there, it offers a warm respite, and suggests that maybe the world isn’t so bad after all.  Maybe there’s hope. 

Slowly I get to my feet.  Nothing seems too badly damaged. I touch my face.  It is sore, but I don’t appear to be bleeding.  I start to walk home, home where I can lose myself in a book, drift into another world, another life, before coming back to this one again, tomorrow, when it will all be the same once more.   

Scar Tissue (Ages of David, Part 1 of 8)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Hold on,’ I said, finally looking up from my work iPad and paying attention to the nurse I’d been following, ‘this isn’t a consultation room.’ 

‘Of course not,’ she replied and behind her the four other people, all dressed in light blue scrubs, gathered at the table, ‘we’re going to operate.  Remove your shirt please.’

Despite my surprise, I complied, more worried about whether I’d be able to ride my bike home from the hospital than anything else.  Given the long drawn out process, the eighteen months of confusion, to get to this point it would have been churlish to demand a more convenient, or at least forewarned, slot.  Moments later I felt the needle slide into my skin and knew the local anaesthetic was being driven into the nerves around the lump in my back.  I continued to feel the hands prod and probe as they tested the waters and then the gentlest pressure as the scalpel began to slice my body apart.

There was a tugging and gouging as fingers dug under the skin, as blades separated muscle and flesh from the lump.  It’d been there a long time and had become embedded in me; had bound itself to me.  It struggled, refusing to give up its home easily.  I imagined the scalpel snatching through individual sinews, watching them ping back limply, as each one fell the lump was prised a little further.  It was uncomfortable and unusual, the feeling of fingers inside me, but not painful.

The consultant chattered away, explaining what he was doing to the registrar, prompting the nurses.  I may as well have not been there.  I couldn’t see anyone’s face, just the tray of instruments in front of me and, if I glanced down my body, an array of legs.  No-one even warned me when I saw him adjust his pose, brace himself and there was the distinct feeling of frustrated pulling.  When all the muscle and flesh pinning the lump in place had been cut away and still it refused to budge, the last option was to wrench it out.

A grunt, a final tug and a silent rush as air filled the cavity. 

A surgical gloved hand dropped a white quivering blob stained violent red down right in front my eyes.  It sat and shuddered there, amongst the gleaming silver of the various tools and prongs, like a shell-less egg finally forced out.  It was surprisingly big; much larger than the raised patch of skin would have suggested.  It must have gone deep, deep into my back.

‘All done Mr Marston,’ said the consultant.  ‘My colleague just needs to stitch you back up.’ The gloves scooped up the bloody egg and popped it in a piece of Tupperware, the sort of thing I’d use for some left-over soup.  Meanwhile, I was tugged again.  I could feel my skin being dragged together, two edges pulled to meet and persuaded to knit back into a single piece covering my body.  ‘I am certain this is a cyst, but we’ll send it off to be tested to be on the safe side.  Otherwise, there are no problems.  Maybe you will have a little scarring, but nothing major.’

More scar tissue.  I’m acquiring quite a lot these days.  My knuckles, shin and forearm still show the marks of my run-in with a four by four last year; my knees the tumble the previous February; my lower back shows an ill-conceived tangle with a rose bush when I was eight.  Fading and barely visible are the patchwork from a thousand other encounters; the end of my fingers from sloppy vegetable chopping, childhood fights and scrapes, long completed operations, scolds, bites, scratches and skids, a mesh of a life lived.  In the near future, there will be one across my toe where a nail fell off and regrew into the skin and had to then be hacked out.

And then there are the ones below the surface; the ones which never can be seen.  Both those that were done to me and those which I did to myself.  You can trace each one and say here is where I won, here is where I fell, this was me, that was her, that one was him.  They are a map, a map to the man I have become.

‘You’ve bled on the sheets again,’ my wife told me one morning when my back was stubbornly refusing to heal.  Mainly this was to do with its position running onto my side.  Every time it looked as though the dressing could come off, as though it had bound itself up properly, I rolled onto it in my sleep and the pressure opened the wound slightly.  I left little memories of myself on the sheets, on my shirts; tiny droplets of blood marking a trail away from the crime to the perpetrator.

Scar tissue tells a story, but as it fades the story becomes blurred. 

My back itches. 

Jez they did (but was it the right thing?)

The Tuscan sun is hot in the square.  The afternoon has dragged on since we watched the pageantry on the steps to the church, all checked blurring colour and flying flags against the fourteenth century stone and neon bar signs.  The locals of Castel del Piano, perched atop a hill, shaped from rock and memory, have all disappeared for an extended lunch.  Our place is further out of town so we linger with ice-cream and books, following the shade as it ticks around, moving from tree to house to fountain, the soft catch of water on the backs of our necks.  We wait, the whole town holds it breath it seems, for the race.

Several hours later, later than planned if only because it is Italy, the procession restarts.  The drummers and the crossbowmen, the lancers and the ladies, the clergy with their books and banners, all perform their way steadily around the square and finally, eventually, the horses follow them in.  Only three, one less than expected. One family unable to take part it appears, at least that explains the desolate face on some of the teenager taking part.  Disqualified, or an injury, maybe?  The horses are bareback, wild, rearing to their riders, sleek coats and white spittled teeth.  The tension mounts.

We weave our way to the front, near the start line.  The man in shades and dark suit on the raised platform talks through the PA system, a mix of excitable cheers and calm white knuckles reply. And they’re off.  The crowd roars.  A pistol is fired.  The crowd groans.  The riders rear their mounts.  A false start. 

Back to the line.  More chatter.  The small blonde girl next to me wails in the fading sun as dusk encroaches.  Tired and bored, restless and irritable, we’re all a little emotional. 

Again, a surge, a bang, another false start.  And again.  And again. 

The crowd is starting to get restless.  The paramedics race over to the other side of the track.  A man has collapsed.  Perhaps just for something to do.  My wife and I have run out of water.  The tension growls, the people furrow their brows, the horses shake their manes, the riders jostle each other, the man in the shades and the dark suit chats to two young women, his smile just the right side of lechery. 

Go.

Success this time.  The horses shoot forwards, around the first corner and up the hill. They come round for the second lap, the leader staring to open a gap, but the second horse is still tight on his tail.  They go so fast that even on sports setting my camera captures but a blur, the end of a tail disappearing from the frame.  The crowd roar as the wind whips past them.  Entering the third lap, down the slopes, careering round the corner, the gap being closed between leader and also ran and then it happens.  Unclear at the pace, but a slip of some sort, the second jockey is flung from his horse in a kuffle of dust and a crunching thud into the hoardings.  The horse continues, riderless, panicked by the noise, propelled by the motion, the agony of its sickeningly bent foot driving it mad.  Someone vaults onto the track to bring it to heel.

The race finishes.  A triumph for one house, anguish for the other three, one in particular.  Family members surge through the masses and crowd round the house, its foot sticking upwards in the air, walking on its calf.  A woman turns away, her hands over her mouth.  A plastic tarpaulin is pulled over its head, I lead my wife away; we don’t need to see its end.

Later, my wife says she feels bad, that she feels complicit.  As if by not watching the palio, it might not have taken place.  I tell her no, that none of it is our fault, but quietly I agree with her.

Much later still, as the darkness shrouds the farmhouse where we’re staying, just black outside amongst the vines, some bleak analogies occur to me.  That the race was like the May General Election, the fallen horse the Liberal Democrat party, the tossed jockey Nick Clegg.  It’s not funny, but I chuckle with bitterness anyway.

In May it felt like the end of Liberalism’s long slow death in the UK.  The Liberal Democrat MPs back down to the numbers of the sixties and seventies, their ideals put out of their misery.  The Conservative majority, a triumph of individualism and selfishness.  The challenge now is to ensure that Labour doesn’t go the same way, consigned to the insignificance of small number political parties, lost amongst their principles.

I find myself greeting the news of Jeremy Corbyn’s ascension to leader of opposition with hesitation.  I am unsure how to feel.  On one hand, Corbyn believes in many of the things I believe in.  A fairer society based on equality, social security and state ownership of essential infrastructure.  He supports nuclear disarmament and environmental initiatives that take the long-term safety of the planet over short-term capital gains.  Other areas are concerning.  He is ambivalent about the EU, which is a major worry.  He appears to be suggesting that promoting a return to industry will build us out of economic mire rather than trying to cut our austere way of it which, while admirable, seems slightly naive to me.  We’re too far from pits and factories and docks to voluntarily go back.  He has an alarming tendency to associate with less than savoury characters on the international scene and I don’t believe apologising for the invasion of Iraq (no matter how misguided or downright wrong that action was) should be high up the priority list.  His only prior experience of leadership is as head of Haringey Council, but that’s more than Tony Blair had when he succeeded John Smith.

But the big question is, can he win the 2020 election?  Is he electable?  Much of the right-wing bias press and Blairite factions of Labour say not, and suggest that Labour only wins elections when it lurches towards the centre ground, as with Blair.  This feels intrinsically wrong, too simple.  Milliband, although left of the centre, was hardly the Marxist painted by section of the press and he lost.  I was not filled with confidence by Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper – despite admiring them both on an individual level.  Burnham was an excellent health secretary.  To say nothing of Liz Kendall who seems to have accidentally been elected to represent the wrong party.  It also ignores the elections won by Clement Atlee which gave Labour the opportunity to implement the original nationalisation programme in the late forties.   Harold Wilson may have been in the centre of the Party’s ideological spectrum but his social reforms remain at the cornerstone of today’s easier society.

To say that a left-winger is fundamentally unelectable is too simplistic.  Clearly Corbyn has galvanised a significant proportion of the Labour party and, in particular, a youth vote typically disinterested in politics.  Whether it will still be flocking to his banner in five years times is another question altogether.  Five years is a long time when you’re young. 

No-one can be unelectable unless they are not standing for election.  Everyone has the possibility for their beliefs and policies to chime with the electorate and therefore be return to office. 

Corbyn’s heart on sleeve, emotional rather than strategic focus group tested politics feels refreshing, as though we’ve all seen too much shiny suited, fine-tuned sound-bites to actually believe what we’re being told.  Corbyn’s calling it a new form of politics, but really it’s a return to old school politics where our leaders were able to say and be judged on what they thought rather than spout some bland humdrum that had been vetoed, checked and tested to death until it was safe enough to be meaningless.

While fixed term parliaments do mean we’re stuck with the current crop of bastards until 2020, it also means the opposition have five years to prepare.  They know when the deadline for making a difference will be approaching.  If Corbyn does turn out to be like Iain Duncan-Smith – voted to Tory Leadership in 2001, against expectation, by grassroot support but ultimately useless – then Labour knows it has time to, for once, commit regicide, but I genuinely hope it won’t come to that.  If he continues to talk the right talk and backs it up by walking some of the harder walks you don’t have to do when you have a rock safe seat like Islington North; if the unexpected growth of people feeling that Labour now offers something to believe in, to vote for, something compassionate and fair rather than just a different shade of Toryism, then he’ll have my vote, back from over a decade coloured Green. 

The early signs aren’t good.  A flock of talented ministers refusing to serve, seemingly washing their hands of the whole display, as though that’ll somehow give them credit in the future they imagine.  A shambolically assembled shadow cabinet based on favours for mates: a shadow chancellor who doesn’t believe in consensus politics and only Burnham and Hilary Benn still standing from the heavyweights.  No matter how much I like Heidi Alexander and some of the others it feels inexperienced and like it or not they’re going to have to engage with the media in a sensible, though out way, at some point.  Unfortunately, an idealistic youth vote (which may or may not flutter with the wind), die hard Labourites and hard-line lefties tempted back from the SNPs and the Greens are not going to win a general election alone.  At least a few of the middle aged, Citron Picasso driving, mortgage paying, Tesco shopping, Friends reruns watching, Coldplay listening, Pinot Grigio drinking, two children raising, suburban dwelling people will need to vote for you too.

Jeremy, you’ve got the best part of five years to show that you have not only the ideas (like Ed did, if you ignore that stupid headstone), the passion (like Kinnock, but without coming across a windbag), the hope (like Obama, although please remember that every aspiration should have a caveat around how hard it’ll be else you’ll look like another failed messiah)  and the persuasion (like Blair had, once, before the blood and everyone recognising the scripted tics). 

Good luck.

And don’t screw up because if you’re another Michael Foot and Labour lose even more seats next time round, we’ll be stuck with Tories ruling the roost until at least 2030.  That’ll be a solid twenty years of social division, privatisation, the promotion of greed and the erosion of what makes society, rather than the wealth individual or the corporation, function and I’m not sure we could come back from that.  Whether we realise it or not, we’re all depending on you to give us something better.

 

For tomorrow's tomorrow

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Jenny comes home, late at night, exhausted from the overtime she won’t get paid for, she only turns the one light on to cut through the gloom.  The table lamp and her laptop screen offer the only illumination.  She doesn’t turn the heating on either even though frost is starting to crinkle on the inside of her thin windows.  She could afford it, really, but the last two months have been tight.  Her old car needed a new starter motor, and she needs the car to get to her shifts at the hospital, nine miles away.  Often she has to be on before the buses start running, or at least before the first bus on that route would get her there in time.  The unplanned expenditure means that she feels as though she needs to save.  She knows it’s a false economy, that not keeping warm will probably make her sick and unable to work, but she has to feel as though she’s doing something to help the situation, to make a dent in the credit card bill.  That’s just the way she was brought up.

Jenny warms some baked beans and slaps two slices of own-brand bread under the grill.  For the third night running.  She’ll add some grated cheese tonight to make it a bit more interesting and there’s some Tabasco left.  There’s that bottle of wine her sister bought a couple of weeks ago.  Jenny really fancies a glass.  Her knees and her back hurt from being on her feet all day.  Her head throbs and every time she closes her eyes she sees that office worker, smashed out his skull, calling her a fucking slag because she wanted to clean the gash in his hand where the glass had gone through.  She keeps seeing that memory and a premonition of the same again the next day.  The endless, repetitive churn of people who need different care to what she can provide and those who should just be a bit more grateful.  The old ladies who view her with suspicion, clutching their handbags close.  The angry drunks and the middle-aged guy who needs a friend as much as a nurse.  She thinks about all these things in the gloom of her one bed flat, shovelling watery beans into her mouth, a Youtube video playing in the background, a song that’s too sad really; she should have searched for something livelier.  She chews her beans and thinks about that glass of wine, but it’s for Saturday so it stays there, on the counter, undrunk.

*

Michael is a good student.  Or he tries to be and that’s more important.  He enjoys school.  He likes learning, even maths, which is boring, but every so often, when he finally sees the beauty in the calculation it is all worthwhile.  Michael tries to get to school every day, but sometimes it’s hard.  Sometimes his Mum or his brother, Jermaine, will ask him to pick some stuff – always stuff, always vague - up for them from the other side of town and then, by the time he’s walked there and back, it feels too late so he just watches TV instead.   But he prefers school.  Most of his friends hate school.  They think it’s pointless.  They’re going to be Premier League footballers or a name of some sort, whatever that means.  What do they need to learn for?  They’re better off out on the streets practising, learning their trade.

Michael’s Dad always tells him to go to school, when he sees him.  Michael promises he will and usually he does, even though his sister, Danielle, calls him weird.

 Mister Colbeck is Michael’s favourite.  He teaches drama and even though Mister Colbeck’s classroom is always cold, because the radiators don’t work, Michael looks forward to his class.  Michael likes studying, working through text books, but sometimes it’s good to get out of your seat.  Michael likes pretending.

But Mister Colbeck hasn’t been seen for a couple of weeks.  Not since there was the trouble with the Year 11s.  Something about a boy and a girl.  Something about respect.  It always is.  No-one’s seen Mister Colbeck for a while and they’re having extra English lessons rather than drama and on the cold dark mornings Michael thinks that maybe he should just stay at home.

*

Samuel kicks his heels.  A funny turn of phrase.  One that he hadn’t really understood before, until he had enough time on his hands to learn how to kick his heels.  These days he has more time than he knows what to do with.  He left school with four GCSEs and grand hopes of an apprenticeship, but then so had half his year and there weren’t that many going round.  Three years later and he was pretty much happy to do anything for anyone, just to fill the hours, just to make him feel a little less utterly reliant on his parents.

Samuel changes target from his heels to an idle pigeon.  The pigeon dodges with the onrush of wind and Samuel curses.

The sportswear shop on the retail park had offered him a contract.  Zero hours.  Something his Dad had been worried about.  They were all over the news, apparently.  Samuel didn’t know about that and, frankly, he didn’t care.  He just wanted work, to get some money.  For the first couple of months it was okay.  He worked most days.  There was even a little bit of a bonus when the store hit its sales target.  He’d been enjoying himself.  Jack from the year above at school worked there too and there were a couple of girls Samuel had his eye on, just for a laugh like.  Then Brian, the rota manager, stopped calling.  They didn’t have a slot for him that week, or the next, or the next.  His contract meant he had to give two weeks’ notice if he wanted to leave and find another job, not that there was anything else, and when he’d mentioned going Brian had promised there’d be some hours in the next couple of days. 

That was three weeks ago.  

The job centre wouldn’t give him the time of day.  Even though he wasn’t getting paid he was working, they said.  Samuel doesn’t see how that makes sense.  Can’t they understand that he’s desperate?

There’s no life left in Samuel’s town.  Every day he thinks about heading to the big city.  He’d heard there were jobs to be had there, but he doesn’t have the money for the bus, or anywhere to stay and besides he’d miss his mates and his Mum.  With a sigh, he kicks his heels one more time for luck.

*

Catherine wakes like the bed is on fire.  It’s early, too early.  The light is barely sneaking under the curtains and, even without checking her phone, she knows it is hours until her first lecture.  Last night’s wine and the dancing still race through her blood.  She should still be sleeping.   That’s what the rest of her house is doing.  But she was awake, woken by the sudden, creeping memory. 

Most of the time, it is all right.  She can get on with life, be like a normal person, but it’s always there, deep inside.  And after a while it starts to grow, the sense of dread mounting like cranked pressure, pushing down on her shoulders, a steady weight on her chest, the constant ringing in her head, the ker-ching of old cash registers she’d seen on that old show her parents watch. 

Ker-ching.

It’s the debt.  She’s done the sums.  Clocked up how much her three years of being young with some learning on the side had cost her, or will cost her at some point.  Her Dad keeps telling her not to worry about it.  He keeps talking about what a liberating and enriching experience his years at university had been, even without studying that much.  But it had been different for him.  It had been free for one thing and after he’d come through he was one of few graduates.  A job was almost a foregone conclusion. 

It isn’t like that for Catherine.  Her cousin Max, two years older, had graduated eighteen months ago with a first in biochemistry and still hasn’t even had an interview.  Catherine can’t help but worry whether she’s done the right thing, saddling herself with so much baggage.  Even when her head isn’t pounding, her throat sticky and dusty at the same time like it is that morning, it consumes her.  Has she just spent three years messing her life up?

*

Paul looks at Ali’s mound while she sleeps.  Her sleep is deep and soulful, snuffles of caught air exhaled into the early morning fuzz of streetlight sneaking between the curtains.  Paul looks at them, at his wife and the shape of his unborn child, and felt awash with love, and worry.

Ali had wanted the baby more than him.  No, that’s not true.  She’d wanted the baby imminently more than he had.  Paul wants children too, and with both of them aged thirty-six, he knows that time isn’t on Ali’s side, but there’s part of him that felt irresponsible.  He feels callous to be bringing another life into the world simply to fulfil a biological urge to parent and pass on genes. 

He sighs, quietly, rolls over and looks at the wall.  Because that’s the only option.  Their flat is so small that the bedroom only just accommodates a double bed, shoved into the corner, and with Ali struggling to sleep the night through they’d recently swapped sides and Paul suddenly realised why she’d always complained of feeling pinned in at night.  They both had good jobs and, even when Ali went on maternity leave, they’d be earning more than he’d thought possible when he’d graduated with idle dreams of being an artist.  Funny how life works out, funny how enticing working for a media company can be when the money’s right.

And yet still, this shoebox of a flat was only rented.  The idea of owning a place had been permanently shelved; both of them had been unable to overcome the compromise of location versus ownership.  To stand even a chance of buying somewhere they would have to live somewhere they didn’t want to.  They’d looked into it, a couple of years ago, but had been repelled by the eye gouging bloodbath they’d seen to buy flats which weren’t much better than this one they already thought of as home and in a nastier part of town.  But the contract was up for renewal and the landlord kept leaving odd messages on Paul’s voicemail.  Still, it was an irrelevant dream: they didn’t have a deposit anyway.  Not for the first time, as the magnolia walls burned boredom on his eyes, Paul regrets quite so many holidays and frivolous nights out in his twenties.

Paul’s childhood had been somewhat idyllic.  As a teenager he’d thought the tree-lined suburbs had been a particularly tedious form of hell, but with hindsight the relative comfort and carefree nature of life had been a blessing.  He wanted to give his children outdoor space, safe and reliable schools, but he also wanted them to be exposed to a range of culture and for their father to not spend nearly fifteen hours a week commuting.  That was a lot of their growing up he’d miss.

* 

Margaret looks at the letter again.  There must be some mistake.  How could they be cutting her housing benefit because there was a bedroom unoccupied?  It wasn’t a spare room, it was Jacob’s room.  Didn’t they understand?  He’s only been gone a few weeks.

It hadn’t been unexpected.  Indeed, it had been his whole life coming.  Slowly it had ebbed him away until there was nothing left but a husk.  That didn’t make it any easier, though.  He had been her whole life and now he’s gone.   She’s bereft.  Becalmed.  Unable to summon the energy to get dressed in the morning and now this.   

Margaret hasn’t been in paid work for years, not since Jacob’s Father had left and caring for their son had become a full time occupation.  That was what Mothers did, wasn’t it?  They care for and nurture their offspring no matter what.  Even if, all along, you know it isn’t going to be forever.

Margaret looks at the calendar on the wall.  It shows a picture of daffodils.  Spring for April.  The letter in front of her is dated June.  Maybe it has been longer than she realised.  It’s hard for her to keep track.  Time has become both unmoving and rapid now that her days lack structure.  Still, such a big cut.  She knows she can’t make the difference up.  Somewhere inside her head, she knows she’ll be moved on, away from the memories, the last things she has of him.

*

The final few hours of an election are occasionally decisive but this time feels as though we’re entering the last act of a seaside farce.  Russell Brand has gone back on his previously militant, tour ticket selling position that we should all abstain from voting and come out for Labour, helpfully after registration has closed.  It is as though he suddenly stopped listening to just himself and thought, “oh, maybe some of those ideas about improving the country aren’t so bad, after all.”  Meanwhile, should Ed Milliband take the top job his first act ought to be firing whichever idiot came up with the idea of planting a stone in the Downing Street garden with some policies carved on it.  The policy stone would beggar belief were it not easily outstripped by the latest UKIP suspension.  The latest in a long line of disciplinary actions, which is beginning to make me suspect the only candidate still actually endorsed by the party is Nigel Farage, takes the biscuit.  Robert Blay was filmed by a journalist threatening to put a “bullet between the eyes” of his Conservative rival forNorth East Hampshire, Ramil Jayawardena.

Seriously, the latest act of bigoted, sensationalist, moronic “telling it like it is” is the absolute pinnacle of what is so wrong with the right hand half of the political debate.  Murder may be as extreme as the rest of UKIP’s views, but let’s not forget that Boris Johnson had a rival journalist beaten up in his youth.  There are people vying to be in charge of the country who are deeply unpleasant individuals and who will go about their political careers in the same unpleasant fashion.

Politics should be inclusive, not divisive.   It should bring people together not create suspicion, resentment and distrust.  We are a modern, first world nation.  We should have opportunities to make things better.  We should be seeking to establish how we want to live in the twenty-first century not still holding onto to a redundant twentieth century model, not still have the same boring arguments about the basics. 

We should not be interested in the self.  We shouldn’t be voting for low taxes, for small government, for a system which relies on individuals to make the most of themselves.  Instead we should vote for something which allows us all to work together to make something greater than the individual parts.

Margaret Thatcher famously said that there was no such thing as society, that there are just men and women and the family unit.  She was wrong.  There is nothing but society.  Without society we have no systems or infrastructure, without society nobody looks out for anyone other than their immediate.  Society provides us with homes, with jobs, with culture, with entertainment, with industry, with innovation and with greatness.  Without a society as advanced as the one we are blessed with, we would be little more than cavemen scrambling around for food and warmth at the expense of others.

I don’t know about you, but that isn’t how I want to live.

Will Hutton in How Good We Can Be writes about a compassionate capitalist society.  He calls for the system whereby corporations are bound to the communities, the society, from which they spring.   Corporations which pay tax, which are not subject to the piracy and short term gain of the management buy-outs, that become embedded in delivering what they set out to do, that offer apprenticeships and sustainable growth.  The renationalisation of essential services from utilities to the internet, from transport to the stock exchange, of reminding business that its subject is to serve society, not the other way around. 

That’s a good start.

Then let’s create sufficient homes for people to live in by building sustainable, affordable rental properties.  We can create a more diverse approach to living that doesn’t see everyone scramble to get on the housing market by limiting the amount a property can increase in value in a given annual period, by taxing profits from house sales, introducing rent controls and removing tax benefits for buy to let landlords.

Let’s see a return to fully comprehensive education which gives all children the same opportunities in groups of mixed ability allowing those who struggle to learn from their peers as well as teachers.  Let’s end university tuition fees and accept that a well educated society is to everyone’s benefit and so we can all pay for it through taxation.  Let’s push our universities to be centres of academic excellence, striving for world leading research for the benefit of the nation, not because it makes more business sense.

Let’s stop this petty, futile squabbling with Europe and internally with ourselves.  Let’s recognise that the problems the country faces are because of our own greed and the failure of the state to properly regulate and support society.  They are nothing to do with immigration.

Let’s properly invest in the NHS, both clinical and non-clinical.  The rich can continue to use private providers if they wish to skip queues for non-essential procedures, but they can help pay for a system that they will invariably use at some point.

Let’s increase the minimum wage so you can actually live on it, scrap zero hours contracts and ensure that everyone working gets a just reward for their efforts.  And for those who can’t work, either temporarily or permanently, let’s end the stigma they face and treat them with respect and dignity.  Imagine yourself in their shoes:  how would you want to be maligned in the national press simply for caring for a relative?

Let’s have high quality armed forces, but let’s take the moral stance of ending nuclear deterrent and foreign intervention unless it has the express support of the United Nations.

Let’s seek to end our reliance on fossil fuels.  Let’s seriously strive to be the country that leads the world back from the brink of extinction.  All of the above is pointless if the world chokes to death within a generation or so.  We started this mess with the industrial revolution; let’s have the courage to try to end it and with advanced green technology be at the world’s vanguard again.

Let’s be a shining light, a beacon for the world to admire.  You want to put the Great back into Great Britain?  Then let’s doing by becoming the fairest, kindest, greenest, most moral, most supportive nation in the world not by whinging, moping, blaming others, over-hyping the handcart’s destination or harking for a bygone idyll that never existed. 

Sure, this isn’t going to happen overnight.  It probably isn’t even going to happen in a single five year term, but over the course of a generation.  Obama’s big failing was to give too much hope.  His slogan should have been “yes we can, but...”  It’ll be hard, it’ll take time, but, you know what?  That’s good enough for me.

‘Are you secretly a communist?’ my wife asked me in the candle flocked Copenhagen bar over the weekend.  I’d been verbally thinking through some of the ideas above, and some slightly more radical ones.  ‘I wish you’d just think before you speak,’ she sighed, not unreasonably.

Do I believe in five year plans, state control of everything, the suppression of creativity and response to challenge, no wages, complete theoretical equality for all and gulags on Orkney?  No, of course not.  I’m not an idiot. 

I may be naive.   Okay, I can live with that.  Common theory holds that I will regress into selfish, small-c conservatism as I grow older, so perhaps allow me one final naive, ideological flourish, okay?  I’m mean, what do I know?  The above might not be feasible.  I’m not a politician.  I’m not an economist.  I’m not even a journalist.  I’m just someone with hopes and a computer who reads a lot.

In the end, this isn’t about me.  It isn’t about you, either.  It isn’t even about some abstract, half-formed idea I may have of future children.  When you vote tomorrow, this should be about all of us.  I hope that your decision will be one which helps to bring about the best and brightest future for every single person in this country.  It should be for all of us.  Together.

When asked why he wanted to be Prime Minister, David Cameron famously replied that it was because he thought he’d be good at it.  Even by his own targets, he hasn’t been.  Instead, over the last five years he has been ostracised on the world stage, seen the union at the heart of the United Kingdom stretched to what feels like an irretrievable breaking point, and created a less equal, less tolerant, less wealthy and more fearful society.

“A new dawn has risen, has it not?” Tony Blair smiled that sunny May morning nearly twenty years ago.  The past five years have felt like a particularly bleak, dark and cold night for many.  It might not be dawn just yet, but surely we can at least switch the lights on?