Photo by Emiliebjork http://flickr.com/photos/emiliebjork/

Second episode of this potentially sprawling tale - set to include psychotic drug dealers, psychic friends, a posh girl wearing a tutu, a confessional spread in the Daily Mail and some unfortunate blackmail.

Anna was the kind of girl who calls you up from the bath because they're bored. The splashing makes for an entertaining backdrop to a conversation about boys and their need for affirmation. She liked words like affirmation. She turned them round in her mouth like chewing gum, pulling them out and stretching them. She recognised their ridiculousness and revelled in it, bohemianism bought from a second hand shop with some battered cowboy boots and some men's shirts that she wears loose with big belts and short skirts.

She always talked about boys – even as we stumbled blindly through our mid-twenties in the blasted hinterlands of childhood, her conquests were never men. To call them that would be to give them far too much power – they were boys, foxy boys and silly boys and nasty mean boys made of puppy dogs tails, never men with stubble and flats and expense accounts. It amused me, thinking of the investment bankers that strained to date her, playing at adulthood with gold cards and Porsches while she laughed, imagining them in short trousers and sipping her wine.

These were the boys that need affirmation. They called her at odd times of the night, full with booze and big ideas. They texted her with increasing desperation, her phone beeping like a Morse code machine in the midst of a battle.

"I hate it when they get like this", she said. "Why can't we have fun? Weren't we having fun? I thought we were."

"You were," I said "But they want something more."

"Oh, what a bore," she laughed and poured another glass of wine, her cigarette smoke sweet from cherry tobacco. "You're so much less trouble," she giggled and leaned over, pressing her lips against mine. We stumbled towards the open door of the bedroom and fell on the unmade bed, her cigarette discarded into a glass of water on the bedside table, fizzling out with a satisfying hiss. Afterwards, wrapped in the sheets, she smiled and turned on the TV, one need satiated another to be fulfilled, her eye turned to the chaos of a war film.

"Isn't this thrilling?"

"Totally." I replied - it was was one of their words - 'totally', said so it floated to the ceiling but somehow I knew were talking at cross purposes again.

It was hard to know the real Anna. She reshaped herself reading I.D and Dazed And Confused, contorting into caricatures of crazed parties girls, smearing her lipstick and crying until her mascara had made shadows down her cheeks. In my bedroom, staring up at the glow in the dark stars I stuck there when I was eleven, she'd suddenly come out of the creation – a shivering body beneath the duvet, neuroses knotted together like elastic bands.

She said she hated her family but she didn't. She wasn't sure what hate really was. She was disappointed in her parents and she disliked her brother. Her mum cried a lot. She tried to hide it but would stand in the kitchen cooking with tears dropping into the casserole. Her father was tightly wound, a Victorian with a broken time machine who sat listlessly in the livingroom reading the FT and smoking a pipe.

Upstairs, her fog headed little brother busied himself with something stronger, flooding the whole of the top floor with the thick fug of weed, passing it off to disinterested parents as the smell of Thai sticks, his mother quite pleased he was embracing Buddhism.

All her friends were in therapy. They carried it with them like a fashionable accessory, something to clip onto their key rings and stuff in their designer handbags. In the pub, conversations revolved around the latest discoveries, hitherto unknown childhood traumas, diagnosis and doses, little pots of pills rattling in clutch bags.

Then against their doctors' advice, other medications would make an appearance, vodka and whiskey and gin and wraps of coke that they snaffled greedily in the pub before the club, aware that the landlady was a little too blind and a little too old to suspect them of anything untoward, totally unaware that her son, Joey, was the biggest dealer in town and that, in a cistern in the men's loos, there was half a pharmacy's worth of medical cocaine. He made an effort for the girls' school crowd, sieving the coke with food colouring – pink powder was just their kind of designer drug, it matched their mobiles and their lipgloss.

I knew full well I was a novelty to them. In a world full of boys in blazers, their brothers' rugger bugger mates, I was an intriguing proposition. To them, Grammar School boys were an acceptable bit of rough. Comprehensive kids would have been taking it to far. With my dad an ex-copper and my mum out at work, I was as working class as they could cope to rub shoulders with.

I'd drop my 'h's and harden my vowels and they would lap it up. It was a tiring game but strutting down the highstreet with ten girls' school girls in the full pre-meltdown Britney rig certainly made an impression on the boys used to bully me at school.

Photo by MannaFromHeaven http://www.flickr.com/photos/mannah/

Another start in this week's selection box of beginnings...which tale do you want to hear more of?

Photo by MannaFromHeaven http://www.flickr.com/photos/mannah/ 

Possibly a longer thing...depends what you think.

I have never liked coffee. I can’t take the bitterness. My taste buds get jittery around it. I drink tea, black with a slice of lemon floating lazily on top. A maid once delivered it with milk. I ended her employment. I am particular about details. In hotels, if the bed is not turned down properly, the corners tight, the pillows arranged in symmetry, I request a new room.

Something a little darker...

The boy at the bus stop hauls up his hood. His eyes are piss holes in a tundra of acne and sticklebrick stubble. He glares out at the road, daring pedestrians to meet his gaze. His body is taut, tight sinews, his leg twitching slightly. He is aching to smash something, a bottle, a window, a face, something to translate the energy into action.

A tinny beat leaks from his headphones and his hand raps out a beat on his thigh. He has seen me in the same way a leopard sights an antelope. I am wearing a suit. He is suspicious of suits. Suits mean social services. Suits mean pigs and police stations. A suit is a uniform. He fucking hates uniforms. He spits – a long arc of phlegm streaking across the pavement. Then his phone rings. The ring tone is gunshots. He flicks the earphones from his ears and answers with a bark.

He must be about sixteen or seventeen, no more than five or six years younger than me, but his words are alien. Everything is staccato. The linguistic brutality of txt messaging made audible: “Dam wha a sket. I’m vexxed blut. Dam dirty ho.” He hits the button and the slips the phone into his jeans pocket. The anger flashes brighter in his eyes.

Photo from: eeneline http://flickr.com/photos/77819887@N00/

Don't worry, it doesn't stay as sappy as this entry. Incidentally I am now part of a blogging family. Make sure to read The Navy Lark (www.20six.co.uk/thenavylark) and Railway Cuttings (www.20six.co.uk/railwaycuttings).

The number of women I have said “You’re beautiful” to must be in the plumper part of double figures. I can’t have meant it more than half the time. Perhaps even less than that. Beauty is a devalued currency, like the Deutschmark in the interwar years, so cheap you can stack it up in wheel barrows, too cheap to buy anything more than trinkets. There’s no need for magic to keep up appearances, just well deployed make up and a healthy dose of Photoshop. Real beauty is the kind that still shines through beneath the pale passing pall of a hangover, the bad hair day and the blackened eyes of blues.

Life, like people, is seldom beautiful. The city strains beneath the weight of grey clouds, faces that do not smile, free papers that litter the land like ash in the aftermath of a nuclear winter. Beauty is found in unexpected places – a child chasing a balloon along the river, an old couple shepherding each other through the park, a red squirrel peeping out from foliage, a woman concentrating hard on applying her lipstick, using the polished glass of a shop window in place of a compact.

So we come to an end...but he doesn't.

It’s a cockatiel, the bright yellow suns of its cheeks blazing out from the bed of green. Its call is insistent and familiar, a fragment from a half forgotten soundtrack, an incident from a long way back. I rewind my mind, unspooling echoes and images that seem almost totally unrelated until I fall upon it – one afternoon in the early 80s, a bird cage in the garden and a fox in the bushes, two songbirds we were looking after for a friend of my mother.

The fox, feral and frightening to a city child like me flew from the shrubs like the Human Torch in the Fantastic Four, a streak of red across the grass. It hit the cage like an office worker frustrated with a vending machine that has swallowed their money and it tipped right over, from maximum security to an open prison in a moment. I rushed at the fox with a broom, shooing it away but the damage was done, the female bird had flown and the male bird was stuck beneath his water bowl, screeching and screaming.

That night my Dad drove slowly round the estate, a fishing net from a beach holiday ready on the passenger’s seat. We could hear the female songbird’s call for days but my Dad didn’t find her. She was high in the canopy of someone’s illegal leilandi, confused and afraid. Her mate skulked around his cage, spitting at you when you got to near and shunning the seed for a while as if he were paying penance for not making his escape. For the next few years, until I moved away to work, I dreamt of the bird’s song, imagining it was still living up there somewhere, though I knew it must have been butchered by a buzzard long before.

The cockatiel’s call is the same one I heard back then. She is lost and wants to be found again. The branches aren’t strong enough for me to climb. Once again I’m unable to make a difference in the world, standing here looking up through the branches, shading my eyes and feeling tears well up. It is enough. I have to do what I came here to do. Walking out of the trees, the cockatiel’s call seems louder, it has been turned up, it’s track there for pathos, the cheap trick of a hack arranger.  

The fence is low but there’s wire on top of it. I contemplate a running jump then imagine myself lolling in the barbs like Steve McQueen at the end of The Great Escape, only fatter and slower. So I put my foot up and use a low branch for leverage. Then its there, the train, whirling past, a smear of lines, some commuters faces stretched across the windows, the sound of its horn as it blasts through the unmanned station ahead – “Stand clear of the platform, the approaching train is not scheduled to stop.” I’ve missed it. I have been late for my own suicide.

I step back from the fence. 17.25. It was on time. The bloody thing was on time. It’s not done that for months. Not since the blight of engineering works spread like a rash from Clapham, not since the snow blocked the line and those kids threw those breeze blocks onto the tracks. There has always been something to delay it. But today of all days, it is on time. I’m shocked.

The means of my death has passed me by. The momentum in my heart and in my head has been swept away in its wake. I stumble on a pile of mulch and collapse to the ground, laying my head on the broken body of a recently felled sapling. I am alive. Things can change. Sometimes timetables tell the truth. But its luck of course, not fate or God or Allah or Buddha or angels but luck. And I’ll take it because while you make your own – it’s nice to have some to start with.  

Photo by KevMann16 http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevmann16/250409231/

Third (and penultimate) part of Tracks Of My Tears. My how long these minutes stretch! Comments especially welcome today...I have a horrendous cold. Hope everyone is having a good Friday.

I can see the fence now. Another few metres and I’ll be there. The place of my death. Perhaps this is the point I am meant to review my life. I give it two stars. One given for a dramatic ending, another for the kitchen sink bickering of my marriage. The rest was just formulaic filler.

I wonder if Katherine will turn up to the funeral. I suppose not. When I have threatened this in the past, she laughed. Well, who’s laughing now? Still her, I suppose. Her and Larry of the loafers sat around their range cooker, drinking coffee from massive outsize mugs, the ones she so coveted watching repeats of Friends for afternoons on end.

In these last minutes, the sun seems even brighter. Perhaps I am now really living, drinking the last of the juice from the glass, sweeter because it’s running out. A bird is speaking somewhere high in the trees. Not singing, speaking. People always say that they listen to a bird song but that’s just a misunderstanding like overhearing a Russian on the phone to his lover, his sweet titbits of tenderness sounding like curses and death threats.

The sound of the chatter is familiar but not native. It is the lilting talk of a more exotic bird than the usual slaggy starlings that slope around this wasteground. I want to see it. If I spy this creature, it will be my last interaction with the world – better by far than a mumbled greeting with a docile dog walker and his flea bitten beast. If there is a God, it might look more favourably on me for this, finding some little wonder at the last.