Chapter 27 - The Alien And The End Of A Friendship

Sean* had his own ideas about what entertained him away from the flat. He kept a motorbike at his parents house, had a full driving license whereas I had a provisional license just for learning to drive which was more useful as a means of officially identifying myself than as any entry to driving something with wheels on it. He had other private places as well. They were places that I knew about but knew nothing much about, all of which was part of a regular spontaneity that lay somewhere between his personal privacy and the friendship between us.

His ideas of what entertained him intersected most with mine when we were both centred around entertaining in the flat and around shared tastes in music. My favourite times in the flat were the simple shared meals where we took turns in cooking for each other. Sometimes Mother gave us fruit and veg that were surplus from her allotment. There the good in her gifts lay in how we shared them out inclusively. Shane's favourite dishes to make were spaghetti bolognese and spaghetti carbonara, meals that were interesting to me for how Mother would never have thought to make them. With both of these dishes he was lauded as the local expert. My favourite dish to make was Fisherman's Hotpot, a recipe which involved layers of fish, partially cooked onions, mushrooms, and partially cooked sliced potatoes, in a deep casserole dish with a cheese sauce to bind the dish together. It was a one pot meal that was baked for an hour in the oven. One reason I liked the recipe was the way it disguised thrift. It tasted good using Coley, a fish that was sold cheaply in medium sized £1 bags on the local market as being fit for being cooked as cat food. In this respect I was like Mother. I drew self esteem from finding good use for materials that others dismissed. I was also like Mother in so far as I was blind to the downsides to having pride in thrift, the temptation towards compromising a good plan by using weak and shoddy goods to fulfil it.

Outside of food, washing up, housework, personal hygiene, and all the daily household chores that we divided between the two, sometimes three of us with Jenny, the space we had was at it's best when we used it to entertain others. A dozen people could sit comfortably in the living room, and more besides with a little repositioning of the furniture. Some of the more mildly disturbed of my friends gained the nickname 'The Young Ones' in my diaries after their visits for the way their conversation reflected an amusing lack of awareness of their surroundings and other people, similar to the short lived but much celebrated situation comedy of that name that ran on BBC 1.

The age range of friends who visited ran between four years younger than us, many of them trapped by unemployment and a weak private rented sector into living in their parents houses, or in grotty bedsits, through to people who were older, and of better means than the unemployed youths. The latter were usually long term friends. When the youths joined in the open house times in the big flat they wanted nothing stronger than a cup of tea, through some who brought a beer or two with them to share and drink sociably. Until it happened I never thought of the open nights in the big flat as a pop-up community centre for the local unemployed, but that was what one role that the big flat temporarily filled. Often the common factor between us was our experience of unemployment. When we had an open house for the tea drinking guests there was always music. The chat could be a bit rowdy and serious by turns. But the point for me was that the space was as open as friendliness would permit, the rules were a sort of non-drug version of the idea of set and setting, where set meant headset or how you felt and setting was the space the person was in. Part of the dynamic of the group was that it was rare for anything to get truly personal, for people to leave hurt. Another part of the dynamic was that I could be assured that they all knew when to leave, usually at a time that seemed sensible to all unless some particular conversation had become particularly deep and engrossing. How much of the good will people discovered in themselves in the open house times was down to my character, where through the big flat I unknowingly found a light 'leadership' role, my personal faith, or more simply how everyone naturally interacted remained unasked.  

Farthest along the scale of the groups that visited the open house were the older, officially unemployed, cannabis smokers. They are divided into three groups. The first was the smallest and quietest, they were the dealers. They were quieter than the rest because part of being a dealer was keeping a low profile. The dealers dealt with the other two groups, one of them was the daily smokers of cannabis the other were the occasional smokers of cannabis.

Next were those who bought their dope from the dealers primarily for themselves but if they were in company with somebody they trusted who did not buy their own they were happy to share what they had with the non-buyer. The third group were the non-buyers who would imbibe casually but never buy. Somehow even if they wanted to be regular customers of the dealers they never got to know the dealer, and the dealer did not know them well enough for the dealer to include them in their discreet sales circuit. At the level of a sales/awareness network cannabis was no different to minor social gambling activities like selling raffle tickets, except that the rewards were far more evenly spread. Finally there were people who never saw any of this and were never in company where they were invited to take a drag on a joint who either cared nothing about whether they were able to join in or not, or who would fearlessly moralise about what what they knew nothing about as if ignorance was nothing the be afraid of. The worst category to be in was to know enough about the first three categories to be at ease with what you knew but also to have to endure friends who knew nothing about it and made the moral case for ignorance being the height of morality.

There is one such dealer character named in my diaries. I always found him to be admirable partly because I recorded his name as Supersonic Steve, from Sheffield.  He had the build of a nightclub bouncer but said very little and was generally softly spoken. His presence exuded a charismatic calm. He was the best example I saw of anyone 'doing the double' without seeming to. He played the official systems and led his unofficial, mildly illegal, life, with panache. Some dealers invented a wilfully grubby persona which was designed to be a double bluff to the drugs squad and the police who thought in cliches about what dealers looked like. These dealers offered the police the cliche the police wanted but when they were asked to empty their pockets out, where the drugs squad thought their drugs were the dealer would produce a few stale, now dry, baked beans to which the squeaky clean lifestyle drug squad would shrink back slightly in disgust. They had been fooled again.

Only the regional distributors of cannabis, far away from the town, and the dealers who were the next stage in the distribution could begin to guess at the economic structure and scale of the trade. When they led double lives and in one life ran a business of buying, hiding and distributing/selling cannabis and leading normal lives the metaphorical walls they put up to separate one life from the other were no different to dad saying one set of words to his birth family, with whom he presumably felt at ease, and then behaving as if he did not really live in the house he knew he owned, in the parental house, Overall I preferred to think that the choice of self medication to the how dad shared his moods. The dealers would deny it was a trade. That was the best illustration of how secretive a profession it was. From the middle ages onwards there had been secretive guilds who would not share with non-members of the guild the secrets of the trade, from glass making to whatever. The cannabis trade was merely the latest secret guild. As regards their wealth and place in the economy they were rank amateurs compared with the legal corporate tax avoidance that had always happened but in which there was going to be a boom very soon.

The dope smokers had their open house time at Trinity St relatively rarely over the two years. I was known for being tolerant because I was thought to not know what I was tolerant of about that scene, but I was also known for being rational and calm about cannabis rather than taking some false 'moral' line about it. I found the drugs seen contradictory, if The Quakers ever did cannabis collectively then this how they would make a ritual of it. On the one hand to share the drugs evenly, people had to be attentive of themselves and each other and watch newbies in the circle, who it was unknown how they would react, on the other hand the circle felt inclusive, and far away from normal life. But if the point of taking the cannabis was to release other thoughts the way that Quakers sought the guidance of The Holy Spirit, then unlike the Quakers who permitted occasional speech in the circle we had no approved mechanism to share where each other's heads were going with the cannabis. In the circle I was nearly always the first person to pass on having more, but somebody had to be, that was a given. I can't remember how often the circle came to visit Trinity St, but it happened more than a few times, minimum. Every time I tried it the cannabis worked for me, in spite of my 'weak throat' and that the smoke was the way to get the effect. In the silence of the passing round of the milk bottle I found my own world but found having to keep that world to myself restraining.

The circle were right about both using my flat/inviting me to join them and in choosing the distance at which to keep me, and eventually moving on to other houses. Moving on was a given, anyway. In the circle there were people who were kept out and if anyone asked why then the explanation was that there were well known examples of families who as they raised their children had burdened them with secrets and unattainable expectations that when the young tried to explore and achieve what they thought they should, they were blocked, What the teenager ended up acting out was actually a symptom of what the parents had burdened the child with and denied to themselves. But in public the family would say that the teenager was the cause of the problem and whine 'We did our best for him', embracing being heard to be talked in cliches. It was wiser for any such teenager to explore, but restrict, their access to cannabis lest the drug open their head enough to hear the cold contradictions of their parents voices too clearly and think what they heard was the drug, when it was their parents.

Mother would, and did, make defensive moral pronouncements to me about how the alcohol culture 'Never did anyone any harm.', and how drugs were to be viewed only in binary terms. Abstinence was safe, partaking was the start of the slippery slope which always ended in ruin. 'You can never return to being your old self once you take drugs. You will get addicted.'. These words came from somebody who when I was thirteen had ended her sex education talk to me with the memorable phrase 'And don't you bring any little bastards home.', which was that memorable I remembered that and forgot all that preceded it. She said this without ever slipping the slightest admission that historically the alcohol culture was surely more responsible for more children, literally absent of mind, being conceived out of wedlock, along with mountains of shame because of the fudging of sexual consent issues with the sex as well, than any other cause of bastardy and shame in history. At the time I understood the horrors of bastardy, the secret shame of the parents, the way the child who 'did not have a father' would be teased in school and the different way that would be revealed, the possible disinheritance of an asset that the mis-conceived offspring surely deserved, etc. But at the time of the sex education talk I never said to Mother 'Most bastards are born of drunken and randomly disorganised couplings between people who understand each other poorly and don't realise or care that they are further down the slippery slope of immorality than thy realise.'. When she talked to me about drugs I was not going to debate 'slippery slope' arguments with her, the arguments themselves were slippery slopes well away from solid reason. With hindsight I wish I had linked bastardy and shame with the alcohol culture in the sex education lesson when I was thirteen, but saying anything like I have quoted here, would have made me sound like a stranger she had never met.  

At a simpler level, the circle knew enough about me that they guess at the combined effects of my parents being five minutes walk away and my being only half out as 'gay', with nothing to 'come out' into, that combination alone was reason enough for them limiting  my exposure to cannabis. The circle disliked the drink culture partly because they had found a decorum for what they had which made the verbal and physical aberrations of men when they were drunk look like the out of control behaviour it was. They also had a non-judgemental morality that loutish drunken behaviour was as pointless as it appeared to be. Yes drugs, cannabis, acid, and magic mushrooms could make people do silly things. But if the point about doing silly things was that before you got silly you found a safe place for it where that behaviour was within the rules of the place. What you did there was within the 'set and setting' rules that guided people who took drugs. With a rampant public alcohol culture there were rules but they were nothing like as collectively responsible behaviour as the 'set and setting' rules that the circle abided by when partaking, and when not partaking.

There was a practical point about pubs. If any married man was inclined to work and drink in a balanced way, then when there were jobs some men networked for those jobs via their mates in the pubs. But when the jobs disappeared then their drinking could not be networking for work. So for pragmatic reasons the circle and people who reasoned like them abandoned the drink culture, beyond using it as cover for discreetly selling drugs, because it had lost a key social purpose. For men like dad, another reason they used to go to the pub might have been to find a particular tradesman they knew of who drank in a particular pub. Now, where they existed, the tradesman networked in a different way away from the way they used to in the pubs. The pub became the place where men collectively falsely convinced themselves they were an elite in spite of what had previously given them their elite status-well paid work-having vanished like snow in summer.

If in the circle, and well beyond, we were technically poorly informed about mental health matters like the causes of depression then at least we had a humility about our lack of knowledge and respect for what mental health should be, that we saw the alcohol generation lacked. I was a reader much more than a roller of joints. Since so few people about me seemed actively well informed about mental health matters, I was looking for books to read in lieu of human beings, books that mapped how ideas about mental health had developed, well beyond the 'directive counselling' that the some Christians I had met used on me.

The age difference between Sean and I was under two years. When the idea of stepping up from sedate open house evenings to having a party came up Sean was keener than I was. I could understand why he was keen, he probably attended my only party at the Beaumont St shared house, or hear about it afterwards and that news of that party was part of how we met. I liked the open house 'themed' evening where the guests self selecting and brought their own theme. A bigger party would be more or less the different self-selecting groups that met on their own meeting each other 'would the different groups all be as harmonious and respectful when mixing as they were on their own, and when there would be alcohol about?' was my question and I could not answer the question without accepting that we go ahead with the party. I was still in The Pente's which was another reason I was unsure about a party. But I was looking for the exit from The Pente's by that time. I was slow to learn how much they dislike and would sabotage any agreeable exits from their ranks. They liked to leave some tag of guilt for leaving them in the departing Christian who went elsewhere for a more stable and calmer life/church balance. With the tag of guilt they track the person in the small town very easily and could work on the absentee to make them want to come back. My search for the permanent exit from The Pentes went with my search for informed reading about mental health where I was looking but had not found that key book yet.

In the end it was easy enough to persuade me about the idea of a party. It was the first of three big parties in the flat. Planning it was fun. My younger sister, Susan, helped organise the food as part of being invited with her boyfriend and they both enjoyed the event. In the planning process it became a bigger event than we expected. Large numbers of people came, nearly none of them my church based or youth group friends, though they would have felt welcome if I'd had any say in it. Instead, as part of my preparation for the event the weekly house group meetings of my church prayed over the party. In some odd way their prayers seemed to be directly answered. All the different open house groups mixed and made themselves at home in this new way. Without exception everyone at the party was respectful and deferential towards one another, almost subdued compared with exuberance they showed when in their own smaller sub groups. It was as if these different sets/groups of people had briefly been shown a new way of seeing each other and were reassessing how to connect outside their own group for being given the choice. I was surprised by how well they all got on. Maybe some of the calm we all experienced was also down to how the cannabis smokers were there. They did not light up on the premises but still they brought with them their own quite distinct calm, which they spread in a non-ritual way. I was well impressed. The party went on until 4 am. I was the one who attracted the police in the end, when I was playing one of Bob Dylan's 'born again' albums at a higher volume than I should at four in the morning and with the windows open the sound carried. I am sure only the police heard it but they must have had little else to do. It was a fair cop... 

Between the first party and the second I swapped church, for a Church of England church. The pressure that The Pentes placed on me, so that I should become more like them had become a horrible burden to me, in which they were always right and I was wrong. I remembered the morning church service where everything changed. I went, I was in no mood for worship though worship is meant to override any mood a person has ended up in.  The preacher spoke and taught for just an hour. To them church services were times when the longer they were the better they were meant to be. I sat and stopped listening and speed-read the entire book of Job. If that book was about how Job appeared to be wrong where he wasn't wrong, but he was being tested. I felt wrong for where I was and did not know whether I was wrong or I was being tested. The results looked too similar to spot the difference. I forget who said what to who and when and where they said it, but I am sure it was mutually unpleasant enough for me to know that they did want me back, I found a surprising level of reassurance in how explicit their rejection of me was.

To some people churches are like dogs are to their owners; when the human relationship with one dog ends because the dog dies the human gets another dog. They have to do that to maintain their belief in canine companionship. With joining a church the nature of the companionship is somewhat more abstract, and very different in character to regular canine support, but all the believer does is change their theology for one that they can live with better. The principle of 'replace to maintain' remains the same; if you believe it then you will maintain your belief. If you don't believe it then you don't know why people go to church or own a dog. Sean could not understand why I joined another church after leaving The Pentes. He understood the pain and hurt I deserted when I left the Pentes. Perhaps the analogy that worked for him was that of a drug or medicine user; I had changed drugs whilst he saw no need for me to take anything. I was still at the 'replace to maintain' stage. I had moved on to sharing in a quieter, less overtly controlling and less outwardly supportive church, probably as an indirect long term effect of the first party amongst other experiences of the shared life in the flat. So when the second summer party came around I was in a different place and had less support behind me. The party went well enough but a certain familiarity set in amongst the guests and slight edginess was present before the end of the evening. Maybe the edge came from the newer faces who turned up, though none of them were gate crashers. Again Sean and I could tell each other that it was a success, but a slightly more qualified one.

From before me getting the Trinity St flat and all through the times we were there, Sean and I had a connection with Penzance. We or he would go for a week there every so often and stay with friends. Graham, with whom I found The Grateful Dead by us both listening to Anthem of The Sun' together that first time in his music room which was close to the flat, had moved to Penzance around the time I got the Trinity St flat, and he occasionally came back to see us and draw us down there again. Sean had kept up the visits to Penzance more than I did, sometimes going just with Jenny. sometimes with all three of us going down, depending on what local commitments I had, and what I feared Mother would approve of or disapprove of with me. Sean's family were a bit 'out of sight out of mind' about him. They trusted him to get out any scrapes he might get into whether he was two miles away from them or several hundred miles away. They cared but trusted him to use his intelligence. I was three streets away from my family and my intelligence was less trusted. It was almost like I had to watch Mother partly for how when she thought she was right I knew that she was probably wrong, but saying so to her took tact and observation. Observation took time.

Sean at some point became seriously smitten with the idea of living in Cornwall and at the same time seeing the small town life he left behind when he went to Cornwall as a series of loose ends to tie up that if they were tied up intelligently enough then he could bid his time in the midlands and life close to his family 'Goodbye'. He started to look into training as a fully qualified mental health nurse in Cornwall. He was away part of the time and came back and there was a sort of drift between us that neither of us realised was happening. Events were happening in the town too. There was discussion that we did not have because it raised too many unknowns and potentially raised too many hackles between us. Call it avoidance because that was what it was. He thought that if he arranged an agreeable ending and departure then I would always keep the flat on and he and Jenny would always be welcome. I had given him the impression that I was staying in the flat for a long time. As far as I could tell that was correct but neither of us accounted for my family's ability to export chaos into other family members' lives without being seen to. 

When we were together for very long he was 'Tiger' to me being 'Eeyore' and somehow it balanced out better for both of us than expected, particularly when we were surrounded by our friends. But if 'Tiger' and 'Eeyore' were a better team than Eeyore expected neither Tiger nor Eeyore asked each other how life apart from each other might work. Tiger knew, he had plans. Eeyore had the flat but he lacked the fizz to be good at light and easy friendships on his own. During the times Sean was away I had fewer guests, for my being the duller of the two of us I found the book that changed my life. It was the first counselling/self help I had seen and the title caught my eye. The book was 'Depression; The Way Out Of Your Prison' by Dorothy Rowe, which I found by chance, second hand for £1. The price was right for me, though applying the book to my life would cost me a lot more. I was also drawn towards the illustration on the cover, a line drawing of a human figure walking away from the broken vertical lines representing prison bars. The illustration could have been the cover of some 'redemptive' Christian paperback. The book was redemptive if the reader heeded the authors words, and it was as absorbing in it's detail as 'Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' had been to me years earlier. I was starting from scratch with everything in it. With so much of what was in the book seemed to concern my mental health it felt like it was written for me personally. Before reading that book my awareness of mental health had been a hedging around the subject that matched the hedging around the subject those around me did.

By slow degrees, I swallowed that book whole. I read and reread sections to make sure I understood them so that when I read the next section, built on the last, then I understood it right. It took me a long time to read. The book was systematic, there was so much detail in it that the detail had to be unpacked slowly to be understood properly.

Then Sean returned from his latest fun times in Cornwall and he had his departure schedule partially worked out in his mind but whilst he was away something had changed that none of us predicted. My sister and her first boyfriend broke up. Bad enough damage but containable. The damage that was harder to contain was that 'on the rebound' she fell for one of Sean's biker friends who was also a friend of her now ex-boyfriend. I liked Graeme in the mixed company I often saw him in. As far as I knew, formally, he was still registered as living with his parents. When Sean returned he invited Graeme to stay at the Trinity St flat both when he was there and when he was gone. The way I took it privately was that I did not know which of them, Graeme or Susan, to dislike the most, or why, but whilst I was working it out I had to work harder at keeping the space between us all positive. I had not expected my family to follow me to the big flat this way and wondered why she and Graeme did not spend more time in her council flat then I knew the answer. With Sean moving out and coming back when he wanted to, the domestic situation had moved out of my control and into his terms. 

It soon became clear that on his own Graeme could be moody and I was in the midst of my own battles as I slowly grasped what  Dorothy Rowe had to tell me. I had yet to grasp how much self books require not just the book but additional resources to draw on for the content of the book to be properly absorbed. If I was going to do my own emotional repair work after reckoning up what needed done then I needed either specific personal emotional support or a more general quiet around me, Graeme fancied himself as a guitarist and had a guitar and amp. At a sociable volume he was apt to tunelessly jam on his guitar and amplifier for hours on end, perhaps to explore with himself his lack of personal direction the same way I was reading Dorothy Rowe to figure out how I had got so lost. The noodling on guitar was harmless enough, but disengaging for him and anyone around him in a way that Graeme would not have done with people he liked, or in any other personal space.

On the surface I was coping and I had enough to do in life to appear to be generally well and engaging. I was empathetic to them because they needed to be together and we needed to keep as much as possible away from the parental house. Their new set up created future tensions between me and Sean. Sean and I put off talking about it less out of avoidance and more out of us both knowing that there was no obvious resolution. I am sure Jenny felt the change in atmosphere too when she was about.

It was in this tense atmosphere that Sean started to reveal some of his parting plans. He wanted 'one last big party'. It would be his last because he was going in the autumn and he might appear again on his own and would be over the next few months, there was stuff to collect, but his plans were not tight enough to say for sure what was happening when. I could  have said 'Who do you think you are? Bilbo Baggins?' It would have been clever if I had said it, and bitchy too. But as Tiger knew Eeyore was meant never to get bitchy, it generally comes out as rather sour. That would have been sour.

Sean got his party, and given that the preparation time was relatively short and scrappy the event went surprisingly well for most of the people there, who were glad to see Sean back and mildly curious about his coming and going.  future plans. There were gatecrashers this time, but Supersonic Steve dealt with them. Whilst I wish that they had not gate crashed the party their attempted forced entry was almost worth it to see Steve in action, holding them against the hall wall, their feet in the air whilst he frightened them enough to make sure that they never wanted to come back, whether invited or not.

The part of the plan that we had prepared for least was the winding down and tidying up at the end of the party, with particular reference to how tired we might be, what we'd had to drink and whether we had experienced disagreement in the evening. The end of the evening was when the argument between my sister, me, Graeme and Sean took light and we tried to resist arguing back, but once started the disagreement would not be stopped. Probably I started it by saying the something about being tired of tidying up after people, to which Sean would have said 'The Party was for you to enjoy as well, you should have enjoyed it' interpreting my tiredness being about the party when the tiredness because of my family, because of Sean's varying communication skills, tiredness at what my sister was doing, etc ad nauseam. I would have given my eye teeth to have Supersonic Steve there as referee in the argument, stopping us from adding bitterness even if I had to admit I was wrong. His stillness of character would have saved so much nastiness coming out between us. But he was not there and when the argument opened out there were five of us, Graeme, my sister, Sean Jenny and me. I was in a minority of one. Sean thought I was being churlish, Jenny couldn't have been pleased and had to side with Sean, In further development of the argument Graeme could back Sean or my sister or both of them. I was the bad guy for being displeased for Sean and not as helpful to my sister as she expected. I was meant to be glad that he had a career path properly lined up. I was pleased for him but my pleasure was best communicated one to one, and Sean was too busy planning to sit down and explain what he was planning. I was always finding out too late in the plan to feel consulted. Sean had his own arguments about me souring what seemed so great when he first planned it and would work in spite of me. If I had said that I was pleased for him then in the anger that just kept stoking us one by one would have been twisted into me saying that I was pleased-pleased not to be part of Sean's future. I was forced into the parental role of pointing out that clear information shared promptly and delivered would have helped. By then it was too late. 

The four of them left that night in high dudgeon and before they left they said to me that all four of them were going to leave to live in Cornwall as soon as they could get the transport out. Sean might have been partially packed, Jenny might have prepared a bit. But Graeme and my sister were going to just walk out of the lives they had here, not even give notice to quit whatever they had commitments, a job etc. Presumably they all went to my sister's council flat as a crash pad and spent the night planning their departure and working out longer plans where they had to make them. Every other dwelling was owned by our parents. 

I don't know how many difficult tasks I had after they left, one of the more difficult aspects was simply living with the consequences of the party, though in a way I thought 'If you are going to make a mistake, make it a big mistake'. One immediate task was to have to explain to Mother that my sister had decided to leave the town with her boyfriend and the flat share with Sean had a strong role in 'making her leave'. A grotty job that she was tired of doing another push factor there. This was not the fresh start I expected from reading Dorothy Rowe, but it was the fresh start I had been handed.

*Not his real name but his name for the purpose of this memoir.

**Not his real name but his name for the purpose of this memoir.

Please find Chapter 28 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.