Walking up a Slide
Copyright © 2014 by Daley James Francis
www.DaleyJFrancis.com
Cover Design © 2014 Peter O’Connor
www.BespokeBookCovers.com
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review
The right of Daley James Francis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988
All characters in this novel are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
ISBN: 9781483538921
Contents
1. What is Love?
2. Home is Where Your Friends Are
3. The One That Got Away
4. The Invite
5. Pictures of Lila
6. The Voices of Reason
7. Drink To Forget
8. The Breakfast Club
9. From Despair to Where?
10. Plus One, Twice, Three Times a Lady
11. Emotional Maturity
12. Squeaky Bum Time
13. Nice Day for a Shite Wedding
14. The Reunion
15. Coming to Terms
16. One Door Closes…
Acknowledgements
1. What is Love?
Love.
For some people, it’s hell. For others, it simply never comes. And for people like me, it’s a Coldplay song playing over the scene in the movie where the romantic lead skips off into the night knowing that everything is going to be OK.
My name is Jason Chapman, and I will be your hero, baby.
I grew up watching a ridiculous amount of movies, and I clung desperately to the notion that when you got the girl and the credits started to roll, everything was going to be hunky dory. When you think like this, you’re opening yourself up to a world of hurt.
My home town is the perfect place for a kid to develop unrealistic ideals for what love is. It is the kind of place David Lynch would have used as an inspiration for Blue Velvet: White picket fences and freshly mown lawns on the surface, before you got to the dark underbelly where Dennis Hopper was lurking with a gas mask and a pair of scissors.
Maybe that’s being a little over-dramatic.
Dennis Hopper has never visited my home town.
I spent most of my childhood with my head in the clouds. I watched a ridiculous amount of films and read every book I could get my hands on. Dad had no idea – or didn’t care – about film classification or censorship, so the first films I watched growing up were the likes of The Terminator and The Fly, much to the horror of my mum, who took care of the Disney side of things for damage control purposes. If I go through life without murdering anyone, mum will have succeeded. Although she did let me watch Watership Down, which probably ruined me more than Arnie punching through a thug’s stomach. Thanks, Mum.
I like to think that I’m a good looking guy. At school, I looked like a shorter, slightly rounder version of a Parklife–era Alex James, on account of the curtains. By the time I went to college, I was madly in man-love with James Dean Bradfield, and copied everything from his hairstyle, dress sense and even the way he played guitar. OK, so it was air guitar, but don’t judge me. I’m good at it.
These days, I look like James Dean Bradfield if he gave up being the coolest man in the history of music, started working in a hotel and lived on takeaways, beer, cheap coffee and processed shite. Once my metabolism catches up with me, I’m going to be in big trouble. But for now, I’ll continue to ride my luck in style.
The brown hair-blue eyes combo served me well at school, college and continues to do so to this day, even if it is with my mums friends rather than ladies my own age. But that’s OK, as I prefer the mature lady.
My GCSE results read like a song sheet: a scattering of C’s, D’s, E’s and F’s, and a G in there to give it some added flavour. My friends and I discussed the next step as we left the school. The plans comprised of: blag our way into college, do Leisure and Tourism because it’d be easy, and then go and live in Ibiza for ten years and earn our stripes.
I’d never blagged my way into anything my entire life. However, when it came time to enrol at college, the tutor seemed to take a shine to me. I told her what I’d like to do, and that my GCSE’s were an accurate portrayal of my laziness, but not my intelligence. I just needed to feel something in my gut in order to fully apply myself. Before I left the building, I was on the course.
College was amazing. I didn’t have a clue as to what I wanted to do with my life, but at least I’d have my best friends around for another two years at least, and there was a good chance that I’d meet a girl and we’d live happily ever after.
You know that episode of Red Dwarf where Lister meets his younger self and wants to give him a good hard slap? I’d love that opportunity. You see, by the time I turned 18, my idealistic view of love and relationships was torn to shreds. I realised that, when you let someone into your heart, jealousy, distrust and confusion come to the party, and they’re the kind of guests who get drunk and inappropriately touch people before vomiting on the sofa and passing out in a flower-bed.
I graduated with a ‘Pass’ in my GNVQ (Generally Not Very Qualified) in Leisure and Tourism, but the next phase of my life didn’t plan out quite as I’d imagined it would. I was single, university wasn’t an option and getting a job didn’t seem as sexy as travelling or becoming a holiday rep in Ibiza, which was the reason I’d signed up to Leisure and Tourism in the first place. As a naïve 16 year old about to reach new depths of mediocrity in his GCSE’s, I came across Ibiza Uncovered – a show where a bunch of excitable but unspectacular Brits go over to the island of partying and get paid to get pissed, dance to awful music and pull girls. It seemed like a great career opportunity. My careers advisor had told me to work in a supermarket. No offence to Rita on the checkout, but getting girls into nightclubs seemed like a better proposition.
The problem with teenage dreams is that they are based on TV shows that soon become terrible. The people in Ibiza Uncovered had become dull and pathetic to me. They were repeating the same tricks, only the alcohol had made them bloated and spotty, which wasn’t a great selling point to a teenager. The problem with this realisation was that it was made one year into my course. At least I was with my friends, I thought.
Twelve months later, they were gone too. They all went to university, although one of them dropped out when his girlfriend got pregnant. Sounds like the opening of a Bryan Adams song, but it’s the truth. The ignorance of youth is a beautiful thing, but dangerous. I pinned my hopes on us being inseparable and going on an adventure together. By the end of my teens, these hopes were buried under a mountain of parental questions like “What are you going to do next?”
“Fuck knows,” was the answer to that.
The day I finished college was worse than picking up those disastrous GCSE results. When you’re 16, you don’t care about the future, you’re just happy to be alive and be with your mates, who are as ridiculous as you are. But when you finish college at 18, the weight or expectation bears down on you, but hopefully you’ve become a little wiser in the ways of love and friendship, usually as a result of having your heart pulled out of your arse.
The next step was to find something called a ‘career’. Whatever that means.
I moved to Leicester in the summer of 2000, and got a job at the Hunters Hotel on a Hospitality Management trainee scheme that involved working in every department of the hotel for two months at a time, before settling down as Duty Manager.
The Duty Manager was a dogsbody in all but name, but it was good fun, and by the end of the scheme, I had seen every shade of weird. Some people enter a hotel and it’s a gateway to another world, where you’re allowed to behave like a rock star who’s recovering from crack addiction.
My first shift as a Duty Manager saw me have to wake up a local rugby team so they could meet a bus at 7am. Bearing in mind my shift started at 7am and most of these rugby lads had only been back from a night on the lash for a couple of hours, it wasn’t surprising that this was what I found in each of the seven rooms I visited on my wakeup call:
Room 1 – Two grown men in bed together, covered in each other’s vomit
Room 2 – Empty
Room 3 – One drunk, naked man crying on his bed, twisting his wedding ring on his finger as he rocked back and forth
Room 4 – A still-drunk 6 foot 8 man-mountain who told me to fuck off before throwing a boot at my head
Room 5 – One man, two prostitutes
Room 6 – A snoring mammoth who had to be woken up with a glass of water over the face (administered by a helpful Housekeeper so that I wouldn’t get beaten to death)
Room 7 – A polite young man who was fully dressed and thanked me for coming to see him.
It was a baptism of fire, but for five years, that was my working life. Swanning around a hotel in a nice suit, holding a walkie-talkie, helping each department out and smiling as I went. I worked 60-70 hours a week for shit pay and even less thanks, but it was a good enough craic.
Weddings were the best. One day somebody will make a fly-on-the-wall documentary about what really happens at a wedding. There’s nothing quite like it. Pure chaos. Everyone is angry, bitter, jealous, bored or harbouring a secret that comes out after four pints of Guinness and two whisky’s, threatening to destroy both sides of the family before the evening ends.
The beauty of it was that I had front row seats and didn’t have to pay for a ticket. If you were a screenwriter and wrote down half the scenes I’d witnessed at weddings, Hollywood would turn you away for being OTT.
The first wedding I ever supervised was an Indian wedding, where there were no drinks and everything was expected to be smoother than a baby’s backside. But naturally, being my first one in charge, it was an unprecedented disaster…
After the nuptials, we noticed the two families were sat on opposite sides of the room and were just staring at each other, like the two gangs from West Side Story. We were waiting for everybody to break into dance, when we found out that five minutes previously, the Best Man had kindly informed the groom that not only was he in love with the bride, but he had shagged her last night.
In the wedding suite.
In his bed.
Suffice to say, the atmosphere was tense. The cliché of “cutting the atmosphere with a knife” didn’t apply here. You would have needed a fucking machete.
The poor groom was discouraged from doing anything silly by his doting parents and the evening went by without any deaths, but it was easily the tensest evening I’ve ever witnessed, like watching the “Funny how?” scene from Goodfellas but drawn out to over six hours instead of thirty seconds. Excruciating. All I kept thinking was, ‘How is the bride just sitting there with a smile on her face?’ It must have sapped her of every ounce of energy not to burst into tears or go running to the safety of her wedding bed. If I ever wanted to try and pinpoint the exact moment I became cynical about the notion of marriage, that was it.
Five years of working at the hotel had slowly chipped away at the naïve boy who believed in love and romance, with my view edging more towards the ending of The Graduate, rather than every Jennifer Aniston movie ever made.
On the plus side of things, at least my career was working out. Craig, a handsome thirty-eight-year-old Edinburgh native who moved to Leicester because there were too many English people in Scotland, was my superior. A brute force of tough love and C-bombs, Craig was exactly the kind of mentor I needed to stop myself from turning to the dark side. He kept me focussed, energised and – a lot of the time – drunk. As the Food and Beverage Manager, Craig had devised a number of ways to keep his staff onside and the Manager’s happy. In short, he screwed people over to ensure the stocktakes were great, and made sure the stock-takers never left empty handed when they came to do their thing.
From a staff point of view, when a busy shift ended and everybody had worked hard, you could place your bets that Craig would make you feel appreciated.
He first showed this side to me after a particularly tough DM shift. The reception team had managed to fuck up their own rota and not have enough staff on, which meant yours truly was getting radio calls every two seconds for menial tasks like taking soap and extra towels to bedrooms. Craig watched me do it, then sat me down and fed me some of his wisdom, washed down with a cold pint of Grolsch.
“It’s been a long night,” he said. “But it’d be a lot shorter if you learnt how to deal with those reception girls.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“As soon as you hear the words ‘Hello Jason’ over that radio, you’re on your way. You’ve got to make them understand that unless they really need you, they can get fucked.”
“I’m not that bad, am I?”
“Not yet, but they see you as a soft touch right now. They blamed the rota for the fact that they used you to do these tasks, but if the bar or the restaurant was busy, do would they call you? Nah, they graft it out. Those lazy fuckers need to do the same thing and stop taking the easy route.”
“How did you stop them doing it?”
“On my first day, I switched the radio off and crept around the back office. They were sitting around texting their mates and scratching their backsides, and I appeared out of nowhere and said, ‘You call me again for anything that isn’t an evacuation of the entire hotel and I will skull-fuck the lot of you’. Now they don’t do it. Or look at me. Perfect.”
As terrifying and brutal as that sounded, the guy had a point, and that’s why the top managers never read Craig the riot act if anyone started crying as a result of his often-cruel tirades. He got results, and he achieved them by working his arse off and ensuring everyone else did the same. You couldn’t really argue with that.
“Take Mike, for example,”
Craig loved Mike, another DM who was similar to a puppy; excitable and eager to please, to the point of desperation.
“He’s so nice and obedient and pathetic that he’s got the mobile numbers of almost everyone in the hotel. That makes it personal. Now he gets called to take ironing boards up to rooms when the hotel isn’t even busy…”
“I don’t do that!”
“I know. But it’s a slippery slope. Give them a mile and they’ll take a marathon. There has to be a moment when you say, ‘Right, that’s it’ and give it to them with both barrels. But you reward the guys that work hard and don’t take the piss.”
“With Grolsch?”
“With Grolsch.”
I tapped Craig’s glass with mine, and watched as Johnny, the night porter, came by to fix some drinks for some late arrivals. Craig turned around and raised his glass to the old codger.
“Get yourself a Grolsch, Johnny,” Craig said.
“Thanks, Craig.”
Johnny approached the bar with an added spring in his step and started making the drinks. Craig looked at me, knowing that he’d made his point well.
“Any man who has to endure this place five nights a week when he’s in his sixties deserves a beer.”
“Reward?”
“Exactly.”
“There’s hope for your soul yet, Craig.”
“It’s just a shame that it’s soaked in gin.”
Craig’s other claim to fame was that he had slept with someone in four out of the five conference rooms at the hotel. I suggested that he might as well take his girlfriend there to complete the set, but he said that was too easy, and with the teacher’s conference coming up, the time of his greatest achievement was at hand. Most people would be disgusted at such a sexist conquest – which meant cheating on his long-term girlfriend – but like Tyler Durden, Craig made being a bastard acceptable somehow. If I had tried to do something like that, I’d be hung drawn and quartered for it. Everybody knew Craig was a shitbag. It was expected of him.
When Craig wasn’t working, I spent most of my shifts avoiding work for as long as possible. If I hadn’t been twenty-three years old, with the face of a fourteen-year-old boy band member, I would’ve been found out a long time ago. The Management liked me because I looked good in a suit and people in general liked me, which meant that angry, drunk or complaining guests were disarmed with relative ease. If Craig had a drunk customer in his face, they would be psychologically maimed to within an inch of their lives before being thrown out by Ben the Bouncer, a fat guy with a David Brent goatee, who would often sit at the end of the bar and drink 40 pints of Diet Coke in three hours until he resembled a bloated, pregnant seal.
My main hangout was the coffee machine at the bar. It had a blind spot from the security cameras, and it came with the added bonus of being Jane’s humble abode. Jane was a sweet, cuddly ball of maternal love who would ply me with espressos until my eyes popped out of my head. At the start of every early shift, I would shoot the breeze with Jane before checking each floor of the hotel for room service trays, vomit and dead bodies.
“One espresso for sir,” Jane would say as she dropped a tiny cup filled with brown heaven on the work surface.
“You’re a legend, Jane. I suppose I should keep walking?”
“Unless you want to do some work?”
“That would render you jobless. I would never forgive myself.”
I dropped the espresso down the hatch and left the comfort zone of the coffee machine, feeling the slight sting of a bar towel as it whipped my backside, courtesy of Jane. A job like this only keeps its appeal if the staff are characters, and there were plenty of those scattered around the hotel. They were the reason I came in at all. I saw the potential in them, and they saw my backside at the Christmas party. Fair trade.
The next check-in was the kitchen. Sai, a chunky Indian chef in his late forties with a Freddie Mercury moustache, had the only computer outside of the back office. The others were occupied by the sales and reservations girls, which meant Sai’s computer was the Holy Grail, and if you scanned the internet history, the pit of hell.
I visited Sai’s office every morning to get the daily report, as the DM couldn’t attend the early management meetings in case an emergency occurred, such as somebody setting off the fire alarm or calling in a bomb threat. The second one actually happened once, but it was just a disgruntled ex-employee who had taken acid and decided to prank call every number on his phone pretending to be a terrorist. Proof that drugs are only harmful when used by idiots, he’s now serving a three year prison sentence. What a bellend.
The daily report included any VIP guests who were staying at the hotel, and the biggest pain was Mr Loury, a businessman originally from Pakistan who spent far too much time in the East Midlands.
This guy was a mystery to me. He would complain about everything and still tip through the roof. He once spent 20 minutes complaining to me about his bedside lamp not working, which I could have gone up and fixed in a quarter of that time, before handing me £20 for assuring him that it would be fixed by the time he came back from work.
Craig despised Loury, and made it his mission to piss him off whenever the opportunity arose. Despite this, Loury was the main reason that the majority of the F&B staff would kill for Craig, as Loury had inadvertently paid for the unofficial staff party. When Loury’s son got married at the hotel, Craig was trusted with Loury’s credit card, and told to “Cut it off when it hit £3,000.” The tab for Loury’s guests came to about £1,000 worth of drinks. The rest of the budget went on wine, spirits and copious amounts of Grolsch for all of us. To this day, Loury knows nothing about the debauchery that he funded, but we thank him for it in our prayers every night.
When Craig read the daily report and saw the word ‘Loury’, a sinister smile appeared on his face.
“What are you smiling at?” I asked.
“I drank two bottles of red wine with my curry last night. When Loury goes to work, I’m going to take the nastiest shit in his toilet. Might accidentally remove the air freshener as well. You enjoy your day.”
Once I had read the daily report, the next step was to head to the back office and speak to George Walters, the General Manager. The GM was OK, but like all top managers, they could save a baby from a burning building and all the guys on £6 an hour would still think they’re a cunt.
He didn’t help the situation. He would walk up to the bar while it was packed with customers and the staff were sweating blood, and ask them to make sure the ashtrays were emptied. There was nothing more patronising – not to mention demeaning – than an idiot with a suit and a degree but no grafting experience completely missing the point of how their business actually ran.
The GM and I would take a walk through the hotel lobby, talking about the events of the day and making sure that each department was prepared. Although he was a 9-5 suit working in a hotel environment, the GM had a pretty good eye for detail. He could walk through the lobby and spot something that nobody else had noticed, like a light bulb that had gone out or a mark on the wall. He knew his hotel well, but not the people working in it. That’s the price of being the guy at the top, I guess. But he liked me and wanted to see me progress.
In truth though, the job was getting stale. I loved the people, and Craig kept me on my toes, but something needed to change. In the hotel industry, you only get promoted when someone dies or moves on. But it wasn’t the place that was the problem for me; it was me. I had no long-term plan. It was like GCSE results day all over again, but it’s not as sexy to be a directionless fool when you’re twenty-three.
The main issue was that my job had become my social life, something Craig had warned me about but I hadn’t heeded his warning. I had killed any realistic chance of getting a girlfriend unless I worked with her, which was an unofficial rule of mine: don’t have a fling or get into a relationship with a colleague. It would be doomed to fail from the start. It was bad enough working stupid hours in the place already, but living out our private lives at the same time? Nah.
It was time to branch out from the confines of my job and start dating again, but I had no idea how to do that. I’d been out of the game for a long time, and had only been on two dates in the last year.
The first one was when I went to the pub with a friend and started chatting to an Australian girl behind the bar. We went out for something to eat after her shift ended and we had a bit of a fumble, and that was the end of that. Working shifts guaranteed that our diaries never synchronised, which meant any hope of a relationship fizzled out quickly. People tend to stop asking you out after you’ve turned them down a dozen times.
The second date was set up by Mum, which was a little embarrassing, but nowhere near as bad as the date itself. Emma was new to Leicester, and she had worked for mum for a bit. Mum tried to do a nice thing and set us up, but it didn’t go well.
Imagine pulling all of your teeth out, then replacing them with salt crystals. It was that painful. I kept trying to force the conversation, but all I got was one word answers. Not only was Emma mute, but she chain-smoked too. Of all my bugbears, smoking is the worst. You might as well let an animal nest in your mouth. It would have the same effect on me: Instant loss of interest.
Two weeks after the date, mum told me that Emma was gutted I didn’t call her again. I will never understand the opposite sex.
2. Home is Where Your Friends Are
Jim and Sean were my two best friends, and they were the two most different people you could ever meet. Jim and I went to secondary school together, and all he had ever wanted to do was join the army. He watched war films, read books and magazines filled with tanks, war stories and god knows what else, and was hell-bent on joining at 16. There was no Plan B.
Sometimes I imagine what he would have done if he’d been turned away. I think he would have become Mike from Spaced, only thinner and more homicidal. Saying that, I remember catching him crying at Ghost, so maybe I’m being too quick to judge.
I admired Jim for being so focused and bloody-minded in his career. I had drifted all over the place and had no idea where I’d be in five years. Jim knew exactly where he’d be: shooting people and disabling bombs in a faraway land, or playing Xbox in my living room. Either way, the British Army would be paying him a salary. That was pretty cool.
At school, Jim terrified most people. The product of a broken family who had little money, Jim was the happiest kid I knew. There were kids with perfect families who moped around and whinged about how unfair life was, but Jim would smile through a funeral. I think it made a lot of people uncomfortable, but it was what first drew me towards him. I like people who weren’t just what they appear to be on the surface, and on Jim’s surface, he was the stereotypical squaddie: brash, cocky and more than a little sexist. But for a guy with such a rampant libido and an apparent lack of respect for women and other people’s relationships, I had never seen someone pour so much love and attention on a sibling. Jim’s little sister Faye was his pride and joy. He was a beautiful mass of contradictions.
Jim had lived with me for 18 months, ever since he had seized the opportunity to work at the army recruitment centre in Leicester. He saw this as an opportunity to indulge in the uni lifestyle he’d missed out on. One day, he turned up at my door and announced that he was moving in. It was like the opening scene of a sitcom, only the laughing track was just my own nervous laughter, and I figured that he had done a Van Damme and gone AWOL for some reason. I thought it better not to ask about it.
Jim’s only belongings were a sports bag filled with clothes, his army uniform and a framed picture of his regiment from the day they had met the Queen Mother. It soon transpired that the army had actually offered him accommodation, but he turned it down so he could live with me, his best friend.
Since living with me, Jim had put a few pounds on around the waistline. Nothing to us civilians, but to Jim, it was torture. He’d say that we were making him soft, but before long, we’d be sharing pizza and beers. I was delighted to be contributing something to the British Army, even if was an out-of-shape squaddie with a drinking problem.
Jim and I first bonded over our love of films, and the fact that I was the only kid at school who wasn’t terrified or weirded out by him. We would re-enact scenes from Full Metal Jacket, taking it in turns to be Gunnery Sergeant Hartman and the recruits. It was a lot of fun, if you were a geek like us. If you weren’t, it looked like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: The School Years.
If you were writing a remake of The Odd Couple and wanted the absolute polar opposite of Jim, you would come up with Sean, my other housemate. Apart from the alcohol intake, Sean had nothing at all in common with Jim, but found him funny and interesting in a documentary-on-serial-killers kind of way. I think Sean was waiting for the day that Jim finally broke and became a Chuck Norris character, but sadly it never happened.
Sean worked in holiday sales full-time, but his dream job was to manage a football team. He was working his way towards it, taking FA courses and leading a local under-14s team to glory in the league and cup for the last two years straight. Jim and I would often go to watch the kids train on a Thursday, and listen to them bantering away with each other as Sean put them through their paces.
Sean was the ultimate beer monster. He worked hard, but as soon as it came time to cut loose, he did so with aplomb. If you tried to keep up with him, you’d wake up the next morning filled with pain and regret, with the emotional and physical scars to show for it. I once walked into the bathroom to find Jim fully-uniformed in the shower, covered in vomit. He had no idea how he got there or why he was doing it, but the last thing he remembered was Sean suggesting they “have a few beers”.
Sean and I met on the last day of secondary school. I was picking up my GCSE results, and Sean had just moved to the area. His parents introduced him to my friend Will, who lived on the same street. Will knew that I would be a good fit for Sean, and he was right. We clicked right away.
On the same day, Jim broke into the leisure centre and stole two boxes of Mars ice creams, and spent the last hour of school giving 144 Mars bars out to people, like a young Willy Wonka. Sean thought this was hilarious, and a bond was formed.
That night, we sat on top of the hill in the big park and drank several warm cans of Fosters. It tasted like piss, but we didn’t care. The world was our oyster.
Cut to five years later, and Sean had been living with me and Jim for the past six months, after his relationship with Georgie broke down. Sean was amazing at his sales job, and had bought a house at 18 years of age, which to me was insane, but when he sold the house and made £40,000 profit just before moving in with us, I changed my opinion. The problem for Sean was that he had traded in his house and relationship for a fat cheque and sharing a home with two idiots.
Sean had prepared himself for the beer-monster life, but then he met Georgie, and fell in love with her instantly. She domesticated him right away, without him even realising it, and from the ages of 17-22, Sean was a hard-working guy with a house, girlfriend and a dog. Then one day, Georgie came home from work and used the words “marriage” and “children” in the same sentence, and suddenly the house was on the market and my rent was one-third cheaper. When I asked why he gave up on Georgie, he simply said: “You either meet someone at the right time or the wrong time, and it was ten years early for me.”
I knew where he was coming from, but it didn’t stop me thinking that he’d made a huge mistake. But out of love for my friend, I took Sean to Benidorm for a week after Georgie left. I like to think that it was fun for him, even if he did spend seven days on a conveyor belt of lap dances, Tequila, and crying into his t-shirt sleeves. I indulged myself with several bouts of karaoke, but I turned my nose up at the opportunity of putting notches on the bedpost with fun-loving-yet-easy girls who wanted to use and abuse a soft-skinned fool like me. I used the excuse that I was there for my mate, but the truth was that I was fucking terrified, and haunted by a dream I had where I was raped by a hen party, and woke up with a bottle of Lambrini hanging out my arse.
Jim tried to do his bit to help Sean get over his heartbreak too. He came home from being stationed in Germany with a brand new car, and offered to take Sean and me to the Peak District to celebrate Sean’s new-found independence. Unfortunately, he’d gotten used to driving on the right side of the road, and following five near misses, three bouts of road rage and two visits to a ditch, we decided to abort the trip. Instead of long walks and fresh air, we opted for no exercise and air that smelt like dead animals, by allowing Sean to drink himself into oblivion at home. We ended the night by taking Sean to a strip club, and spent all of our money keeping Sean in dances, until he was kicked out for vomiting into a girls ass crack as she performed a handstand in front of him. We had to pay another £100 for the trouble, and we didn’t even get to keep the footage.