Chapter 19 - The Alien Struggles To Find His Feet

When I moved house for the first time I had no idea of the size of the grey economy locally, or to what degree it would underwrite my life for the next half dozen years. Mr Charles Lloyd, my first landlord, was a lean dapper dressed sixty something single man with a full head of grey/white hair and a strange manner. He presented himself as if he was some more knowing character out of a Dickens novel. He was a minor Dickensian rogue with overly gentleman-like affectations. 

When I was his tenant I did what was required of me but I kept my distance from him, not least because I thought his obscure 'ladies man' humour was deeply weird and totally unfunny. I could trust him to not throw me out when I paid the rent but I found humouring his affectations after a short while. If there was male that I could have compared Mr Lloyd with, then that person would have been dad. I found both figures to be deceptive and vain, both bolstered themselves by falsely flattering themselves for different reasons. Whatever living in this new place was going to cost me, personally and financially, it neatly put into long term storage some parental emotional baggage that I was glad to have a limited distance from.

The difference between dad and Mr Lloyd was a  difference in emotional baggage. With Mr Lloyd I had none, what dad had given me to carry, because he did not want to carry it, was bulky enough for me to spend several lifetimes slowly throwing it out. And still I would find that dad had left a few loose emotional threads that showed even more of his old failure to explain himself. I rarely saw Mr Lloyd and the less I saw of him the lighter I felt.

The rent was £8 a week and we had to put 50 pence pieces in the ancient looking gas meter, but the rates and electricity bill were both in his name, and included in the rent. He did not allow me a rent book because he 'feared the taxman would find out about him'. But what the taxman might find out about him was anyone's guess. The rent money was paid two ways. The first was to pay the rates and electricity bill in lieu of rent. The second was that we put money into his bank account. I would much rather have had a rent book but he wanted me to live with no rent book. I had qualms about paying the rent out of my dole money but I had no other option. Rentable properties were few and he was the first landlord who had accepted me.

 

He usually arrived at the house every Friday fortnight to check in with me and the other tenant. He said he had another house on the other side of town which was where he went to stay the night. Sometimes he would come back the following day if there was further unsorted business. In final partings he often 'joked' about 'Now I am going off to be entertained by a rich widow'. We said nothing. He left us nothing to add. I slept on a low single bed in a grotty box room, with a mismatching wardrobe and chest of draws that oozed neglect. The less said about the flooring the better. It was definitely a cheap deal in which I felt cornered.

Technically the house was furnished, but the furniture was minimal and came with the least amount of taste and coordination humanly possible. If an art student had created an installation and called it 'the ugly rooms' this house would have effortlessly outdone the student's efforts. If the furnishings had legs and a voice they would have asked anyone passing slowly enough to hear them 'Can you  direct me to the local council tip? We will walk there if that is okay with you.'. There was no heater or heating system in the house. The cooking space was an illegally built extension that covered part of the already small backyard. Given it's insecure construction it was natural for the kitchen space to attract dampness. But the house had one room that the parental house never had, a bathroom with a bath in it. That the bathroom took up half the space in the back half of the upstairs and I slept in the box room next door was interesting. I went from the box room in the parental house to the box room in this new house because another student had claimed the front bedroom. Grotty as it was, it was still an upgrade for me. Had Mother given me the address when she first got it, I would have paid more rent but I might have had the bigger bedroom.

I was no stranger to the 'doing the double' lifestyle, where habitually appearances both deceived and misdirected the unobservant. Mother had quietly worked cash in hand in a second hand shop for years. She regarded the work as valid work even as she said less about the dislocation between the cash economy she worked for and the official government way money should be accounted for. Without doubt Charles Lloyd 'did the double' in some way where the point became that what he was doing and why resisted explanation. He had his houses and peripatetic lifestyle and never stayed in any one place for long. He kept moving. Keeping moving was not the point of that life, though he made it appear that way, he used the idea of keeping moving to deflect people from what he was actually doing. Deflection was the point, but from what? It was clearly financial, but I never knew what it was, which proves how well the deflection worked. Whoever his latest  limited audience for deflection was, the next audience was the one that mattered.

I understood 'Doing the double' to be three things, either claiming benefits and working cash-in-hand (Mother, though technically dad claimed for her as part of his benefits, she did not claim benefits independently of him), or owning properties that are misregistered in some way and were undeclared to the apt authorities (Charles Lloyd), or it meant keeping different sets of accounts that selectively obscured money and profit from the financial authorities when they came to examine the books (Wilsons Carpets surely did this, though at the time I was 'being trained' my attention span and pay grade was so low that I would never have even thought to wonder about that). With all three levels of doing the double, those that did it would do their best Uriah Heep impressions and protested until they bored their audience beyond belief that they were 'honest citizens doing their best in straitened times'. 

The 'doing the double' that I knew to trust and felt had the least amount of humbug attached to it, and was much lower scale than all the above, was practically invisible. Because it was practically invisible it might well have been much more widespread than the money based scams were. Some CND members 'dealt in marijuana'. That is, they got the marijuana from the secret regional distribution point somewhere in the next county or further away, they packaged it up in small packages and sold the packets to friends they knew who wanted it. Even as I never bought any dope I never saw the distribution of it as a criminal activity, the scale that I knew the consumption of dope to exist on made it much nearer moderate self medication, a sort of travelling invisible health food shop, where when what doctors might have offered anyone was less likely to be helpful whilst it gave the doctor high social status through the patients deference to them. It went without question that generally people who smoked dope had a much healthier relationship with their dealer than many patients had with their doctors. Many who smoked dope were on the dole and unemployed and a toot a day made the way time and money were worked at odds against each other made their life seem more bearable.

This was the economic backdrop against which I lived. But where other people could keep the equivalent multiple books of accounts and multiple accounts of their lives in their heads, and trot the right story out to the right audience, I could not do that. I was limited to either being silently annoyed at the elements of fraud in the systems that supported me, All fraud required deflection and when deflection was required of me I proved to be no good at it. I got tongue tied and simply could not give the evasive explanation to the audience who were meant to be most receptive of it. Or others would use me in their fraud, for the most flat footed of official schemes for either social or work based support, where I did not realise that those who could avoid these schemes scorned them, but were happy to see people misused effectively for no profit to anyone to give their own more shady deals better cover. 

My move improved everything. In the new house I could 'treat the place like a hotel' when I wanted to, I was the proprietor of my own time and space. I was not going to complain to myself. I set my own house rules and change them as I thought fit. If I had left a house that was better decorated, much better run, and was much more welcoming, for somewhere that was threadbare or charmless then the threadbare house was still the better deal. For me there was a claustrophobia about the parental presentation and house rules that I did not realise before I left the parental house, that it actually was claustrophobia. The two miles distance between the parental house and my new address was positively medicinal in themselves, that Mother would rarely appear on my doorstep was another bonus.

The new arrangements were that I was meant to present myself twice a week at the parental house, the first visit was for dropping the laundry off every Wednesday, prior to wash day and being sociable. The second visit was when I was meant to take my laundry away, and it was usually on a Friday. This agreeably eased me out of their Saturday routine which I found to be such a grizzly time that it diplomacy itself for me to avoid being there then. I ate with the Mother because that was another part of the contract. If dad absented himself for those meals then I did not mind him 'treating the house like a hotel', he was the owner, and owners of hotels were meant to have their own quarters away from the place. What he was now stopped from doing, by agreements that he had to abide by, was to treat the house like it was a pub. What happened in the pub stayed in the pub. He could drink himself silly with his mates in the pub as much as he wanted. The walk back to the parental house existed to sober him up enough to aggrieve less those waiting for him at home who never drank much and had near-no comprehension of why he needed to be so drunk so often.

At Beaufort St, my new address, the social pressure was very much reduced, however threadbare a dwelling it was. B St was a long way from both the parental house and the public toilets that previously I had spent long periods haunting the toilets as if I were a ghost because I felt like I was even more a ghost in the parental house. In the parental house the more I had grown and changed, the closer I felt the walls close in, such that I could not endure it and at the time did not know how to leave the place. With the pressures much reduced I remained resolutely the sexual fantasist I was, and did not know what to do about being, but my willy waving mostly fell away. Alas it still wanted to lay claim to me. I was walking to B St from the parental house with my clean laundry one Friday night, not long after the new arrangements were 'bedding in' when I was unaware that I was being followed. The following Friday night I was alone in the threadbare house and the other student had gone back to some more sumptuous dwelling. There was a late knock at the front door. I went down in my dressing gown and opened the door. Standing there was one of the less attractive willy wavers from the toilets who was the person who had followed me, unawares of me, the previous week..

I had no warning that he would call then. I did not know his name because when I was a ghost in the toilets none of us who were there used names. For the rest of this story I shall call him Mr Aftershave for a reason that will become comically and horribly clear later. I was unprepared for his knock, which was part of his plan, to fake my consent to sex with him through his presentation of secrecy/surprise. In a cold voice he said 'Can I come in?' when what he did not say was how much more he wanted after the front door had closed and he was in the house. On Friday nights, intermittently, until I moved three years later Mr Aftershave  would visit for anonymous sex in the discomfort of a half furnished house rather than seek sex in the higher level of discomfort in the public toilets. He always visited after being in the pub. Friday night was the night of the week that he drank most and probably the time when the memory of the time he lost to the toilets haunted him most. I called him 'Mr Aftershave', he was like a teenager when he applied it. One night that he visited he showed me his newly shaved genitals, which were as small and ordinary looking as his pale and hairless dumpy shaped body was big. To complete the effect, that night he had dowsed his genitals in aftershave. he must have been a masochist who got off on the discomfort of aftershave on his newly sensitised genitalia. He must have thought I was a sexual masochist too the sex literally left a uniquely memorable and bad taste in my mouth as I began to sexually relieve him as he urgently as he insisted I should.

I had no idea how to process any of this. I could have pondered on the secretive nature of unspoken experiences that the alcohol culture produced, when drunken men communicated how drunk they were to other drunken men. That might have allowed me to reflect on some of the acts that dad might have performed apparently willingly when he was more sober and he might have thought more carefully before doing them. I could have wondered more how Mr Aftershave used my secrecy as a sexual ghost in the toilets to blackmail me into more ghostly and secretive sex with him. I got no more out of the weekly sex than I had in the 'quiet times' in the backroom of Wilsons Carpets. I could have pondered on the distance between the official version of sex, on how 'It was designed for marriage' and how all I knew had been revealed to me through the boarding school which itself I could not describe why I went there, much less describe the strangeness of the view it gave me of sex. I could have reflected on how the sex in toilets and the visits from Mr Aftershave did for sex what 'doing the double' did for people's money problems. Both the willie waving and 'doing the double' were clearly firmly established as part of a grey or black economy, where the sense of imminent debt required unorthodox evasive actions. I had fallen deeply into one was of 'doing the double', secretive sex, and could not 'read' with any surety the other way of 'doing the double', via finance. 

I did not contemplate any of the above. If I had even begun to probe any of the above I would have needed far more support than I could be assured of getting, through which to recover after exploring it. The nearest to such support that was local to me was a mature Quaker who had troubles enough of his own but who nonetheless received me graciously and understood that I was troubled, and that I felt trapped. He gave me time enough compose myself better for the public commitments that I had committed myself to, like passing a Computer Studies 'O' level and being the business secretary of CND, but he showed quite gently but clearly that I was not to try to explore how I had unknowingly developed a secretive life through, or with, him.    

I did not know how people created multiple versions of themselves to account for who they were and how they got money without having to be too honest about it. The most consistent way that I made friends and openly engaged with others was through the politics of CND, my wavering commitment to Christianity, and the sharing of popular music. All of them required money to work, but money was not the point of them. The versions of each other my family had were communicated through the channel that the television was tuned to, which obviously took money to run, and displays of wealth were more integral to what the television showed. Dad was surely at his happiest when the channel was set to the greatest display of conspicuous consumption among the three channels. I often felt least comfortable with this showing off via television, because I had less and disliked it being rubbed in how little I had, which in turn dictated how much I was dictated to in the name of entertainment.

When I first had a television of my own to watch in my own space, away from the parental house I would swear at the politicians in the news and found the adverts for conspicuous consumption offended me to the point where I avoided them. My sense of thrift meant that I could not watch promotions for things I could not afford. 

Once Mr Aftershave knocked on the door on a Friday night when a friend from the Christian Youth Fellowship was staying over. He had nowhere else to stay, his parents were divorcing. The family house had been vacated, ready for it to be sold, and he had lodgings at University that he could go to soon, but not yet. Phil answered the door and the fact that it was somebody else who put Mr Aftershave off quite easily surprised me. But Phil was confused and surely sensed something was amiss with me. We did not discuss it. There was a weirdness about the encounter that I accepted as secretive-but-normal for me that neither Phil nor I had the shared language, and experience of, with which we could make sense of it. Phrases like 'cognitive dissonance' were not part of our friendship. Our friendship ended where a cognitive dissonance between us set in, and stopped all explanation.

When I lived in the parental house Phil saw odd sides to me where nobody knew what to say. A few times I asked him and Keith, his best friend, to tie my hands to the rails at one end of the bed and my feet to the rails at the other end, and then untie me. They did it without question or comment until some more inclusive amusement seemed to be a better thing to do. There was no obvious sexual agenda there, just being tied up and untied after. I assume that I wanted a safe personal experience of being helpless as compared with the less safe wider helplessness that living in the parental house gave me. Exploring that helplessness verbally would have raised more questions than we could answer. If the exploration had been sexual, then it would have broken taboo and ended the friendship. So I chose well from within the small circle of friends I had to choose from. I have no idea what Keith and Phil thought of me asking them to do what I clearly could not do for myself. When Phil left for Bolton to study for a degree his life took on a different and hopefully better course. His experiences of small town life would have shrunk rapidly compared with his new efforts at standing on his own two feet in a university in a fair sized city.

Aside from the grubby dealing with Mr Aftershave where I pretended I was not there, there were at least two other ways in which I 'did the double', and both seemed benign by comparison with what others hid, but made a show of hiding. The first was that I was glad of the state benefits I was on and glad for the independence they gave me, but where 'promised to look for work' I did not take the promise at all seriously. I was a cynic about paid work, that said I doubt I was anywhere near as jaded, knowing, and cynical about paid work as the town's employers were. 

The law at that time was that if an employee worked for two years continuously for the same employer then they could demand a work contract from the employer. Many jobs were that unattractive that wanting a contract to do something so unattractive and be so poorly paid that wanting a contract to do the job seemed counter-intuitive, to say the least. But some employees persevered because they also wanted a mortgage and to own their own property. There was a story of one employee who was in work for nearly two years, had the mortgage and property he wanted lined up and agreed, even though the work was unpleasant. When the employer heard about this he waited and one week shy of the two years where the employee could demand a work contract the employer legally dismissed the employee. Employers feared that employees who had contracts were the thin end of the wedge, where at the thick end there were unions and closed shops. No legal lack of ethics was too low for employers to use to keep their place of work union-free and as cheap as possible.

The best way I had of 'doing the double' was hitching lifts. In that process I used spare space in people's vehicles, I got to places I wanted to be and I escaped grim stories like the above where people got themselves horribly trapped by their natural urge to conform. I had many interesting conversations and learned to be briefly entertaining and good humoured. If I did not remember the conversation afterwards then my forgetfulness did not matter, what I had said honoured the moment perfectly and that was the most important principle in my life.

Please find Chapter 20 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.