Would You Just... Not Board That Train?

Oh well guess what? It's even bloody harder to write today than it was yesterday. That malice serrated whisper of a voice is prattling away about how dumb last night's post was and how embarrassing and I've got nothing worthwhile to say and it's pointless anyway everything is screwed might as well quit now and blah blah bloody blah.

Well hear this, voice: we're doing it again, and again and again and also again and again and then again and again more and again and etc you get the picture, voice, so hey, how about doing me a favour, old buddy old pal, and fucking the fuck off.

- - -

Dog down road barking rapple rapple and clouds spread flat against bruise of sky and telephone wire doing lazy gymnast bounce as night draws in. Life trundling by. I'm in here bent to laptop, so small, really, not important at all, watching the Earth turn onwards.

Here's something: A thought isn't the truth. A thought is... like a train. Like a train coming into the station. One coming in now. "I'm worthless," the train says on the side, in big glowing letters. Everyone on the brain-platform hearing it coming in, looking at watches, going, Harrumm, yes, yes, the 20:16 from Anxiety-ville, right on time, running this service every three minutes for years, like clockwork -- and the passengers all go jostling up to the yellow line and the train grinds in and the passengers push on board, then train pulls out and rockets away through swaying fields of self-criticism, past Hopelessness Gorge, and on into backwaters of Depression Marshes, same as always. Journey bin taken so many times -- at first was just a horse and cart going a way that felt necessary, that seemed to make sense -- but now it's tracks, forty-carriage train, reclining seats, buffet car. Easiest journey available, comfortable routine. Only one problem: going dead straight to nowhere, over and over, thousand times every day.

But listen. Just because a train comes in, doesn't mean that train needs boarding. Can just watch a train arrive, watch it depart. Thunders off, into distance; wave at it as it recedes.

Thoughts come, thoughts go. They make a lot of noise, they clamour for attention. But they all depart. And you alone on the platform with a choice.

Always with a choice.

Here's another arrival. Not announced on the board. It's... a little fella on a wonky bicycle, squeaking slowly up.

"Not a whole heck of a lot of room on here, mister, and going sure ain't easy, but jump aboard, if you'd like."

"Well, where you headed?"

"As far as I can before crashing, I guess. Then I'll go again."

Sounds fun.

See you tomorrow.

Would You Just... Keep Going?

Here's the thing. I'm putting a new post on this blog tonight. That is happening. That is happening even though there's a voice telling me I can't do it, that I've got nothing to say, that no one cares, that I'm making a fool of myself and everyone is laughing at me--

--Seems paradoxical, that everyone could be laughing about something no one cares about, but the voice sounds adamant...

It really is the worst, this voice. If you don't have a voice like it then I think you're very lucky, because mine sabotages every single thing I try to do in my life.

But I guess there has to come a point when you stop listening. When you go ahead regardless. And that is what is happening here. If this post is a mess then it's a mess. And I'm getting up tomorrow and doing it again. And that post can be a mess as well. And every post can be for the rest of my life. But I am not quitting this time.

I wrote a draft of this where I tried to explain all this stuff so you would understand. But the voice sabotaged it all, shut down my brain and threw me off course so I had nothing to put up, hoping the days would turn to weeks, the failure would build, and I'd go back to boozing and not trying. It's so much easier, in a way, to live like that. Feeling worthless, but also never having to ask to be valued.

But I've had enough. So this is going up. I guess I can't explain it now. I guess this won't make an awful lot of sense, unless you already have an inner voice like mine, whispering piercing nothings all day in your ear. If you do then you already get it; if not then maybe I'll be able to write it someday.

* * *

There's this advice about creating art, I can't remember where I heard it, but I've been saying it for years: To make good art you have to first allow yourself to make a whole bunch of bad art.

It's got a ring to it, right? You can tell how wise and true it is straight away. The thing is, though I've repeated it a lot, mostly to impress girls, I don't think I've ever actually lived by it. I always write so carefully, polishing and pruning, removing any trace of what I think of as my clumsy, ugly, embarrassing real self from proceedings before I hit that "publish" button. And that's so hard to do, and so hard to sustain. And the more successful the writing gets, the more I feel it has to be done. And the pressure builds to a point where I can't take it and I quit.

So maybe it's time to just say motherfuck it and let go, to stop hiding my ugly self and instead let him out into the light and let him blink and look around and get used to the fact that he can be out here, he can be himself, in a way he hasn't since I think before the acne, since before the bullying and the depression and all the rest.

The alternative is what I've been trying for a decade now, and that clearly isn't working.

So here we go. I have no idea what's going to happen. But that's part of the fun.

See you tomorrow.

Would You Just... Stop Boozing? Part Two

My sister is staying for the weekend. She's in the front room with my mum and me, talking to my mum about hotels she's been working with, looking at ornaments on the bookcase, drinking red wine. Mum also has red wine. I'm on the Earl Grey, feeling droopy tired and low and unable to concentrate. I should have more to say. This is a situation that requires booze, yet I am not boozing, so I sit there, on the edge of the conversation, a stranger even among my closest family, anxious and sober, wondering why I find everything so difficult.

I go to bed early and sit up tapping on my laptop, listening to the muffled voices drifting up from below. I wonder whether they're talking about me. Liz asking how I'm doing, whether I'm any better. Mum pausing, unsure how to answer.

I realised recently that every situation in my life includes alcohol. I'll sit cocooned at home, in a world of screens and thoughts, and I'll only perhaps have a wine, a whisky, it's not that important. But if I go out, to meet friends, parents, to go to a party, the cinema, a meal, a day off, an evening after work, I'll have to drink.

You fall into it. It's not like getting up at 7am to swig vodka from the bottle in an unfurnished bedsit with wallpaper peeling from the walls, at least not for me. It's more drinking to relieve anxiety, shyness, as a tonic for uneasy feelings, as a bandage, a crutch, a necessity, and finally just as the unconscious routine of my life.

It's easy deciding to stop boozing. What's hard is how to deal with all the neglected life you find dried and withered waiting for you after you stop. After so many years when the answer to every question was a drink, I feel clumsy and ungainly grasping for a different solution.

Even with my sister. She comes into my room, starts looking around for her toothbrush.

"In bed and it's not even midnight, you are being good," she says.

"I'm trying."

It takes me a long time to fall asleep.

***

Next morning, however, is another day. I'm up early and writing, feel growth in my bones, rolling stretch of energy. I goof around with Liz, drink tea.

We don't know what to do with the afternoon -- what do families do? -- but the weather is good and Yorkshire is Yorkshire, so we decide to walk, a walk is the thing, out to the Peaks in ranging wilds to get lost in the heather.

But I'm glum again in the car. I don't feel like walking, don't feel like chatting or listening to them chat, feel the strain of something being required of me that I am not capable of providing. I keep the feeling in check, hide it inside, but it's there, gnawing away.

Then we meet an old man and he makes things better.

"Don't be bothering with that," the old man says as Mum, Liz and I crowd around the pay-and-display machine at the car park.

"Oh, yes, har har," Liz says, rather inelegantly, because she has no idea what to say, but someone has to say something.

"Don't need no ticket," the old man, who somehow has two walking sticks, says. "Police don't come down here. Haven't put in toilets. And got no card, do you?"

"Mm?" Liz says. "It's card payment only, it says."

"Aye, but you've got no card, do you?"

"Ohh..." Liz getting it. "Well, she's paying already." Motions at Mum. "She's too honest. But thank you." Tries to smile him away.

"Only ice cream van comes here," the old man says, not moving off.

"Well," I say, looking at the ice cream van, my eyes narrowing. "Could be undercover police. Could be a sting."

The old man turns to me, levels a long glare, turns back to Liz. This always happens.

My joke having fallen on deaf ears -- perhaps literally -- I abandon Liz, and turn to help Mum, who is having an absolute nightmare with the machine, as she does with all machines.

The old man stands with Liz, who has used up her best smiles and is starting to look uncomfortable. The old man glances towards the car closest to us, a dog-on-board sticker in its window.

He clears his throat. "Dog... on... board," he growls. He looks at Liz. She looks at him. he walks off.

We could not be happier. A Thing has occurred, a genuine Thing, and it was just what we needed. We growl "dog... on... board" at each other all the way down the trail, cracking ourselves up again and again.

***

The peaks take our breath and roll it into deepening valleys and over sharp rocks up into cavernous sky, as they always do. I can never believe we live here. The Earth is splayed clear and hard below us, heather and rough trees poppling out to the horizon, the wind cratering and crushing -- jagged Northern land majestic yet cruel, making you aware more than anything of being on the side of a dying rock-planet looking out, into the allness of space. We stand and feel small. We breathe. We take photographs.

***

The release lasts the duration of the walk, and the ice cream reward, right up to the drive home. I scroll through the photographs Liz has taken, seeing my gimpy thrust-armed skeleton self, over and over, hair whisping loose from skull, morose chub-cheeked scowl though felt I was smiling, one shot after the other. What a beast I look, I think secretly in the car, handing the phone back, saying not a thing.

At home I make a risotto while they drink gin and tonics, and the rice won't final-soften, the greens lose their colour; Mum has bough frunched-up instead of flat-leaf parsley, in the end the meal tastes of nothing, I reckon -- they cry yum but I know better, and I have a headache and I'm frustrated and I want wine. They have wine. I have water.

My sober mind is so neurotic, itchy busy and aware and alert. Gently-blunting alcohol, underwater-green rounding the edges and sliding thoughts happily into place, has always, mostly, worked -- there's a reason I do it. The problem is that it blunts everything else, my writing sense, my willpower, my drive, my flame. And the hangovers are the pits. So jeering sober spike-thoughts it'll have to be.

I want to watch a film, feel without alcohol that'll be second-best escape. Want motion and sound within which to hide. But Liz isn't so keen, we can't decide upon anything. She won't watch The Grand Budapest Hotel or The Darjeeling Limited, they look too "weird" and "annoying". She won't watch The Sweet Hereafter, too slow a drama.

I tell her she's close-minded, she should give something different a chance.

"Leave her alone," Mum says.

Liz says she isn't sure she fancies a film, if anything it'd have to be easy-dumb, like Olympus has Fallen.

"Definitely fucking not," I say.

"Who's close-minded now?"

"Piss off."

Mum makes that little noise that means she's about to suggest something, beautiful Mum so shy putting herself forward, even with her own kids. And no wonder, because:

"I think back here I've got... Yes, here it is -- we could watch Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe?"

"Unngh," I sigh.

"God, no!" Liz says. "For ten years you've been trying to get me to watch Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. I am not going to watch some film called [voice dripping with disdain] 'Fried Green Tomatoes at the Effing Whistle Stop Cafe.'"

Mum looks crestfallen, as always. "Rob's right, you know. You are close-minded."

Liz and I burst out laughing. Sweet old Cath pushed finally to a little sass, plus of course our shared understanding that for no discernible reason neither of us will ever, as long as we live, watch that DVD of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. And after that, though it has taken long enough, everything is finally OK.

We end up not watching a film. I say I don't mind watching the first episode of Stranger Things, which Liz wants to show me, but then we never put it on, sit instead with legs resting on each other on the sofa, Mum in her rocking chair, and we read our books; Liz helps Mum set up an Instagram account, searches on Google for clever writing hashtags for me while I copy my blog posts across to Tumblr; and we sit tapping away, heads down, on our phones but together, not the perfect family but a family, like all the rest, and the night sways on and perhaps the not boozing does have something going for it because Mum looks up at one point to see her two children sitting with her and murmurs that she is perfectly content, and for the first time in a long time I'd have to say that I agree.

Would You Just... Stop Boozing?

Well, yep, I've done what I always do. Fallen into that routine of getting a drink after work, because one can't hurt, because it's either a lonely trudge to the bus stop in grey cold to wait while the wind howls and dead-eyed office workers jab at their phones, to then hustle onto the bus trying to smile at the driver who is trying to smile back, both of us with faces like sad stone gargoyles, to sit then and jab at my phone, scrolling, scrolling, 40 minutes of this, crawling in rush-hour traffic, then 15-minute sore-footed hump from bus stop, exhausted after day running around the bar, to collapse in my room and sprawl for the evening bathed in the soft glow of my laptop screen in an empty room as I nod slowly off -- it's either this or get a nice drink of one of the nice ales I've been selling all day, to reward myself, just a little reward -- and so I get a beer and fall backwards and let it catch me, let it hold me up -- and then halfway down the glass here's Steve, trundling in in his workman gear, that stiff swinging gait of his -- "Hullo, Bobby", "Hullo, Stevie" -- and it's nice to have a friend, nice to have a beer and a friend, after a long day, and we sit and drink and laugh misery-blues, and wait see if we can get anything going.

And then Little Rob is finishing across the road, good old shuffling slouching heart-of-gold Little Rob, so we go over there for one, maybe two -- and then it's mid-shifters at mine finishing, here's Liam Straw and Zoe, heading over now, and suddenly this thing has momentum, suddenly we're together, we're a group warm and good, and everything feels all right -- Steve is buying a round, more money than he can spend on his alone self, and I move on to rum, and then I get one back because that's Right, and Straw has no money but he's ours so we've got him, and it's not long till the guys on the close will be done, the voice deep down knows I should go home but who's listening and it's all lost anyway and we share drinks and this is good.

I get drunk and lurch into awkward spider-skitting anxiousness -- they're playing pool and I should play but I can't play pool, can't do anything, and I go to the bar but I don't know the girl working -- So many new faces, I'm too old, what am I still doing here? -- and I try to act cool but I'm not cool and I'm a lost alien bug fiend -- and back at the pool table Little Rob is collecting his bag, he's on the open tomorrow, and the group is disintegrating and the happiness has gone and we are all of us doomed.

But then here's Jake and Missy, drunk, beaming, riding in on a wave of elation, in matching hi-tops and grunge shirts, bending the light around them, and we all cheer and hug and kiss, and the lurch is forgotten. Missy drinks gin and tonic and cocks her head to one side and throws out all the sass. Jake does his Jake-dance. I snuggle with them both and Jake and I talk and we're two boys and brothers and the love is eternal.

Then it's Dev Cat with my lot after the closedown and Straw and I are doing a skit and we're funny and we know it. We're in the booth behind the curtain and everyone is here and we protect one another, Baby D is beautiful yet worried, and I say words that protect him, and we get bourbon and drink it. Zoe and I are doing a thing where we laugh really loud at everything and then stop suddenly without looking at one another, and I don't know why but it's great, and the night swirls on.

They call time at Dev Cat but this can't be time so we bungle across to the Washy -- cheap Snake Dogs and Chloe eating bagged ploughman's and a mad woman is talking to us and I've got rum again and I feel bad I feel empty I feel great and it's lost all of it is going I don't know what's lost can you find what's gone we race and it swirls and will anyone find us and I can't find us but some people are getting chips and I'm getting chips but I don't eat them and I get in a taxi and go home.

And then next morning I wake up goopy and forlorn, broke-down sad and head pulsing deep-sea-rift-crash, and a tongue like old carpet, and I know I've done it again. Hangovers on my antidepressants are the worst. I eat a banana so I can take my pill and I eat two codeine also and then I go back to bed. I watch YouTube and don't get up till 4 pm, and do nothing then.

* * *

For so long I've been wanting to write more, to get up earlier, to deal with my life. And it's not like drinking is the core problem, but it's perfect avoidance -- I can pretend I'm getting back on track soon, when I get home, on my day off, soon -- but first I'll just have this one drink, I'm sad and the full solution seems impossible but meanwhile the quick solution is right here, a nice beer, medicine, and it helps, it works, even as it sows the seeds for more future sadness, and but you don't think about the future when right now you're in pain and there's something in front of you to assuage that pain.

But I spend half my wages back in bar tills, and I have brief warm highs between days of empty lows, and 2017 drifts on, the same as 2016 and 2015 before it. So I'm going to stop boozing. I don't want to stop drinking -- I like craft beer, I like a good gin and tonic, I like the idea of being someone who accepts a little messiness and imperfection in his life, who enjoys simple pleasures when they can be found. But there is a difference between a Belgian tripel once a week drinking slowly identifying notes in the aroma -- a difference between that and boozing all night after every shift too scared to go home and then hungover wailing through every day off. It is self-destructive behaviour, and it's time it stopped.

So here's this. Let's see how it goes.

Would You Just... Write a new post despite it being months since the last post in which you all but swore to write more regularly, and yet here you are, drinking after work again, sleeping till noon, killing evenings so you don't have to deal with them, killing thoughts for reasons of same, and you find yourself one night stood in your kitchen eating digestive biscuits from the tin staring not through the window but at it, at the glass, not even seeing, your eyes just resting there, zoned in truth somewhere deep down inside yourself, as you eat biscuit after biscuit, hand raising towards mouth probably the tenth now, crumbling through biscuits the way you are crumbling through life, and suddenly your vision snaps to focus and you see yourself in the glass, your reflection, and it's not a moment of clarity or anything, you continue crunching into the biscuit-teens, heading dangerously past biscuit-adolescence towards biscuit-legal-drinking-age, and you spend the rest of the evening doing Not Much As Per Usual, but the look of your eyes reflected in that glass stays with you, how little you recognised of yourself, and whether it's this, or perhaps just the new meds starting to work, but you sit down the next evening home from work after, yes, a little drink before the bus, but only a half, and you realise the moment has to be now, or you're a goner, and so let me pull back onto the main track of this question and ask, nay, beg, with every ounce of my being, for you to please, even if it is just one word, just one measly word, write a goddamned new post, right now?

OK.

Would You Just... Reopen the Tunnel?

So I don't know how much of this has become apparent, but a major motivation for writing this blog series was that I could use it to address the many varied aspects of my life about which I am frustrated, embarrassed. To explore the things that are wrong with me, one at a time, six thousand million times, until I die at a ripe old age not even a fifth of the way through my list which was in all honesty a rough and highly conservative initial estimate not really even scratching the surface of the things that are truly wrong with me.

I cleaned the grill, and I moved back in with my mum, and this was good, and allowed me to clear some space around me, gave me room to breathe.

But I find I cannot go further without first turning to some space even closer than that around me -- namely the space inside my head, because in there it is still utter pandemonium.

Honestly, it's a mess. Dark caverns filled with teetering piles of unfaced issues stacked to the ceilings. Rats of self-doubt gnawing at the walls. Lower chambers submerged in lakes of anxiety. A giant demon, a horned and suppurating arch-field, charging around on cloven hooves yelling about random past moments of shame, such as the time I mistakenly referred to Frank Ocean as Billy Ocean. A room containing a man who does nothing but perspire in front of onlookers, for eternity. Entire cave-systems dedicated to reconstructions of conversations with girls during secondary school, with the role of me played by Leonardo DiCaprio -- in What's Eating Gilbert Grape. A Tannoy on the wall that simply announces every fifteen minutes, as if it was new information, that I am a twat.

It isn't easy existing in such a cacophony of craziness. But for a long time I have had a method for coping with all this mental junk, and that has been my writing. If the space in my head is a cavern, then writing is like putting on my miner's helmet and hoisting my pick and tunnelling up to the surface, lugging handfuls of psychic detritus with me as I go. Emerging into the light, gulping down air, I will fling the mud and slime and bits of brain onto some blog somewhere, for people to rummage through. Take it, I shout, have what you will; it's yours now, I'm done.

And sometimes, among the waste, people tell me they find chunks of ore, hidden diamonds, fragile, shimmering veins of amethyst and quartz. And even if they're just saying that to be nice, and there's nothing there but a load of crap, I'm still that much crap the lighter.

For a few hours I will feel purged, at peace. Like I have fixed myself. But the problem with trying to escape your own head is that wherever you go, your own head pretty much has to follow.

Every time I finish a piece of writing I will awaken the next morning to find with dismay that I have rolled back down the tunnel I opened, that its walls have collapsed in on themselves during the night, that I am once again trapped in the darkness of my mind. All that effort, and I am right back where I started, and it's just as fucked in here as it ever was.

So basically I give up. I fall back on a different coping mechanism, which is to eke out an existence beneath the light shafts of distraction.

The cavern walls are thick, but here and there a tiny chink opens in the rock, a crack that allows stale, fetid air to filter down to me. I'm talking nights out with friends, downloaded films, the dopamine hit of social media feeds, video games where you drive fast in cars or shoot people and the people fall down and you get to think, I did that, I'm powerful.

I shamble between these brief base pleasures, pressing my face to the rock, breathing down as much air as I can. And this pattern ossifies into routine that keeps me alive, but barely. I shuffle on in torpor, resigned to my fate, even as the rampaging of various demons and hellion imps and putrescent ogre-lords -- "HEY ROB REMEMBER THAT TIME YOU THOUGHT THE RAMONES WERE ALL BROTHERS AND EVERYONE LAUGHED AT YOU? THAT WAS FUNNY. ANYWAY I MUST BE OFF. YOU'RE GOING TO DIE ALONE BY THE WAY. TA RA" -- even as their stampeding causes tremors that shake the walls and begin to block the light shafts in one by one.

But still I'll plod along out of habit, hoping some last vestiges of air will continue to seep through, mostly finding nothing. Distractions cease to distract. I stop being able to concentrate on films or games, I sit in bars letting conversations wash over me, I get drunk and night blurs into day and the cavern grows darker and in the darkness I sense shapes gathering, the brush of mottled hide at my back, the flap of leathery wing, a glint of tooth.

Eventually of course the dread builds to such a crescendo, I become so starved of oxygen, that I break out of my routine and strap on my mining gear and make one more great expedition to the surface, perhaps wrestling one of the foul beasts that has been stalking me up as I go. I'll be a different person during this ascent, determined and focused, and I will smash through the crust to the outside world with a cry, hurling the beast away from me, and the beast in light of day will turn out to be nothing more than a common bat, or a frog, and will flutter or ribbit off into the night, and I will breathe a sigh of relief and pass out from exhaustion, finally free.

And then morning will dawn, bleak and grey, and I will open my eyes to find I am lying on cold stone back in the darkness of the cavern, and something in the shadows will be stirring, something that cannot just be a bat, and the thing will smile a serrated smile, and cackle, and the whole process will begin again.

***

So that has been the cycle of my life for many years now. But not this time. Okay, the previous two posts were mostly fuelled by the pent-up energy amassed from festering too long down in the caves, but this one was written when I'd normally be giving up, getting drunk.

It was difficult. Setting off into that collapsed tunnel every morning, to chip away thanklessly, with all the demons crowding around me trying to force me back down. Hitting blockages of pure rock and having to tunnel round far longer routes, or even go back the way I came and try to open another tunnel. Not knowing when I'd emerge, whether I ever would.

It would be so easy if this wasn't the case. If my head wasn't dark, if it was instead like one of those grand ballrooms that other people must have in their heads, open spaces with light from expensive chandeliers gently coruscating, demure residents engaged in polite chit-chat, perhaps a waiter passing around trays of amuse-bouches. It would be so easy if there was a passageway to the outside world open at all times, a wide, poplar-lined gravel drive along which butlers would carry neatly gift-wrapped presents for the waiting masses, who would (the masses would) cheer and chant my name and write nice things about me in broadsheet newspapers.

But no. I've got dingy basements with tribes of scabrous toad-men charging into walls and waggling their flocculent little penises at one another and vomiting down themselves, and I have to sweat and grunt away in cramped tunnels just to squeeze weird excretions like this post out of openings that immediately close back over.

But okay. If that's my life, then okay. The work is hard, tiring, often frustrating, sometimes leads nowhere. But okay. It's also rewarding, complexly enjoyable, cathartic. The actual action of pick against rock, pick against rock, tip-tap-tap, is not, under everything, a bad way to spend the day. And at its core it feels... I don't know, necessary.

Yes, inside my skull there may be dark caverns. But I have a feeling that many people's heads are darker than they'd care to admit, and the more light I shine into my own, the more I go down day after day and reopen that tunnel, the more it might let those people know that they are not alone, that they do not have to be afraid.

Would You Just... Help Your Mum With The Shopping?

I'm at my mum's house trying to clean her kitchen. "Trying" being the operative word.

My mum is a hoarder. Not in the sense of stacking newspapers dating back to the seventies against the walls, or hiding mason jars filled with urine under the beds, but she does have trouble throwing things away. She wants to keep everything, finds meaning, memory, in everything.

"What about this?" I say, holding up a small and badly-painted plastic dog figurine, the kind you might get free with an RSPCA membership, perhaps.

"Oh, no," my mum says. "He's special."

"These?" I point to the mountain of half-empty Tic Tac boxes I've found.

Long sigh. "Well, I suppose. Although if they're different flavours..."

I usually leave my mum to her Ways. I'm not home often, and the odd evenings I do pop by we find enough about politics and religion and my future to argue about without bringing her house into it. But this is different. My girlfriend and I, after a long period pretending things were working when they evidently were not, have broken up, and lacking anywhere more sensible to go it now appears I will be staying back with my mum for a while.

There's not much it would be fair to say about the break up. My life is material for my writing; Charlie's is not. I hope she's going to be happier eventually without me, that we'll still be friends, all those cliches you cling to in a sea of terror and uncertainty.

Anyway, after two days on my friend's sofa drinking whisky and watching, inexplicably, Mythbusters and Singin' in the Rain, I decide I am not going to fall apart, so I cook my friend and his girlfriend a risotto, then go home to my mum's.

This is not my house, I tell myself later, standing in the kitchen. This is my mum's house. She has a right to keep it however she wants. If she finds calm in clutter then that's fine.

Except, are these birch leaves here? Brought back from a walk last autumn, maybe, and now crumbling to dust beneath, what? a pile of ancient Spanish phrase books, some dog-grooming leaflets for the now dead dog, a one-legged, mud-encrusted action figure from my youth, rediscovered I presume while gardening, and a veritable smorgasbord, a cornucopia, of phone and camera chargers, some of these surely from phones and cameras that haven't been turned on since before Live and Kicking went off the telly.

Perhaps I will do a little light clearing, actually. But I'll be understanding. I won't interfere; I will help.

"This?" I say ten minutes later, waving a car-parking voucher from a folk festival held in 2013 at my mum's face in an accusatory manner. "Surely you don't still need this?"

"That will go upstairs," she says, "with the others."

"Yes but are you going to put it upstairs, or are you going to drop it in the other room and then I'll find it under a load of old crosswords in six months time?"

"Oh, Robert..."

As far as I can make sense of my mother's system, she seems to have three baskets in this kitchen for odds and ends, either sort of inchoate, nebulous planets towards which odds and ends are being pulled from the asteroid fields of odds and ends littering the rest of the room, or else the odds and ends are the inhabitants of the basket-planets, now migrating across the room's galaxy to find new homes among the stars (or kitchen appliances) -- it's hard to tell. There is also an odds and ends drawer, that will no longer open all the way, that probably contains clues to the birth of the universe, but I just cannot even think about that drawer right now.

I condense the baskets into one, fit all the odds and ends from the rest of the room into it. I pull out the microwave and the toaster and the bread bin, brush away all the crumbs and leaf residue and sticker-ties from loaves of bread that have accumulated behind. I wipe the counter tops, clear and wipe the table. I scrub the fronts of the cupboards and around the sink and behind the collection of Interesting Shells and Rocks (?). The grill, thankfully, is already relatively clean, but I do under the hobs and the oven front and around the dials. I sort out the Things Under the Table. I sweep the floor.

That's okay, I think. Everything is okay. I cook tea for us, serve tea, respond to my mother's conversational prompts -- Yes, it's tough, it hurts, but I think everything is going to be okay --, smile, take the plates out, wash up. Then I go to my room and close the door and spend the rest of the night worrying that everything is really not going to be okay.

* * *

The office chair is a problem. It's my day off and Charlie is back home with her family and we've arranged that now is a sensible time for me to pick up my belongings from her flat. No longer our flat. It's these little thoughts that are the most serrated. Other examples: We'll never now finish watching season two of Mr Robot together. How will Charlie complete the Day of the Tentacle remaster without my Playstation? And what should I do about my office chair, the one Charlie paid for the day we went to Ikea, when I zoomed about on the trolley like a child instead of thinking about the future, before Charlie got angry and I got to pretend it wasn't my fault? I want to offer to pay for the chair, but there's something about this that feels horrendously pragmatic, cold, like we're negotiating a business deal. But to just take the chair would be wrong.

I text Charlie, offering to pay.

"The chair was a present," she replies. "I don't want anything for it."

I feel sick.

I put the chair in the car, along with my clothes, my PC, my books. The guitars I can barely play. The DVD collection I haven't added to since 2010. All the stupid videogames with the stupid war-men on their covers.

I sit with the cat for a long time. She attacks my hand, bounds away. She doesn't seem to comprehend the gravity of the situation. I say goodbye to her, close the door, leave.

Back at my mum's there is no space on my floor left on which to stand. I look at all my junk splayed about the room. A sorry account for a life. Yet all I have left to hold onto. That night I fall asleep under floral-patterned spare covers, feeling that I am slipping through the gaps between the cardboard boxes and bin bags into a weightless void beyond. I feel like I am disappearing.

* * *

The next morning, however, I have not slipped, have not disappeared. I am still here.

My mother makes coffee, talks about the Archers -- which programme apparently makes her more angry than some real-world wars, yet cannot ever be missed -- then asks me if I will go to Sainsbury's with her.

I have lived back home before, as an adult, and I was bad at it. I acted like an entitled adolescent. I would get in at 3am, drunk, maybe stoned, fix myself maybe one last gin and tonic from my mum's spirit shelf (telling myself vaguely I'd buy replacement bottles some time, never doing it), then lock myself in my room and watch films or play games, feeling unhappy, until it was time to go back to the job I hated. I treated my mum horribly, as if it was her fault I was so miserable. I sat in silent disdain through her meandering stories at the dinner table, mocked her offers to get me out of the house on a walk to the countryside -- "Thanks all the same but actually I don't fancy spending my one day away from the purgatory of that job walking around a large body of water discussing farm-based radio soap operas with my mother," -- and, most of all, I despised being asked if I would go to Sainsbury's with her.

I would slouch along the aisles, scowling, saying I didn't care what we bought, I didn't know when I'd be around for tea, I'd just eat out or something, whatever. I'd be as uncooperative as possible, hoping negative reinforcement would condition my mum into never asking me along again. I would basically be a terrible prick.

Remembering those days now I think about how much I don't want to be that person. How terrified I am of still being that person.

"Of course I'll come to Sainsbury's," I say. "Shall we go now?"

In the car down, as my mother talks about Karen, who I don't know, who was the teaching assistant before Geraldine, or was it Katie? No, it was Geraldine, because it was Geraldine who, her husband Keith, it was very sad actually, Keith had lost his brother Gavin, and Keith hadn't really recovered, although... no, well of course that was the year before, or... God, it wasn't Gavin was it? It was Richard -- as my mother talks, I look at her, think how lonely she must be in the house by herself sometimes, about how she texts me whenever she's in town asking if I want to meet for a coffee and I reply, three days later, "Sorry wasn't around", and she texts back that she loves me, and I don't reply.

"So yes," I say. "Geraldine's husband...?"

We walk around Sainsbury's, chat. I pick up a few Belgian beers, don't say anything about my mother's silence, accept that she worries about my drinking, accept that she is making an effort not to comment.

Back home I bring the shopping in from the car, put it away, offer to cook.

Then I sort out my room. I empty the cupboards and drawers, the boxes and bags, of my own odds and ends, mementos left over from shared houses, old jobs, university, school. I put a few letters, notebooks, old drawings to one side, throw the rest away. I bag up for charity all the clothes I don't want. I strip everything down, dust. Then I put out my books, and the names -- Foster Wallace, Delillo, Vonnegut, Hemingway, Kerouac, Fitzgerald, Plath, Woolf -- look down on me approvingly.

I don't know. It's all a bit fucked. But maybe it will be okay. Maybe a step backwards isn't always a step back. When you've lost your footing, for example. When you've walked head-down into a bog. Sometimes the best way forwards is actually backwards, just a little.

***

I go downstairs. The light is fading. Mum is standing in the half-light staring out of the window, one hand lightly touching the locket she wears about her neck.

"I could get rid of a few bits myself, I suppose," she says. "Take a few bits to the charity shop. I won't be around forever, after all, and I hate the thought of you and Liz having to deal with everything when I'm gone. That wouldn't be fair on you."

I put my arms around her. She is very small next to me.

"I'm sorry I haven't been a very good son," I say.

"Nonsense," she says.

We stay like that a while.