At the beginning of this year I was laden with a deep, tumultuous depression. I was hit with it the way that cartoon characters are hit with Acme anvils or pianos from the fourth window of apartment blocks. I felt as though the rest of the World could see it all approaching, happening and impacting, and all I could do was stand there until I became prostrate and obliterated. A blip on the pavement about as useful as used gum. 

This kind of thing used to embarrass me. Whenever I felt expunged by a depression, I’d just shake it off like an athlete still playing through a broken limb. Whenever I tried to bring it up to anyone I always felt like an attention seeking teenager who had merely woken up one day feeling sad; the aftermath of too many Elliott Smith records, an unreciprocated crush and the desire to piss off parents everywhere, and not a real mental dysfunction. 

But this year, I embraced it. This wasn’t some heroic, selfless feat. Nor was it a dramatic outpouring of my burst sensibilities or profound. I simply had nothing better to do with my time than to embrace something. Sometimes it was my cat. Sometimes it was my boyfriend. Sometimes it was my depression. Most of the time it was my bed.

Some part of this was probably due to my terminal unemployment and consequent complete poverty. Near everyone I pretty much knew and loved had abandoned the city, smartly, to go get actual jobs elsewhere. I stayed in Liverpool.

More accurately, I stayed in bed.

Some days, if not most, I’d sleep for upwards of 14 hours. I stopped eating actual meals. I gave up on basic hygiene. I barely left the house. There’s little point in leaving the house when you don’t even have the money to scrape together for a coffee or a bag of crisps to give purpose to your trip. 

I did try this once or twice. I walked aimlessly around and about like a record needle that jumps only between the songs of an LP to produce a crackly, unsatisfying silence. I’d bump into people I knew. People that I used to know, at least, back when I used to leave the house. I was probably wearing some manner of threadbare, mismatched clothing; the kind staggered with holes and enhanced for ultimate crazy with lived in, never-washed stains and old stick on name tags from unsuccessful job interviews. 

Hi! My Name Is…Willdoany Jobformoney

This is the kind of look that deters most sane people from making small talk with you. When you’re out like that, walking aimlessly, the only question people ever seem to ask - quite enthusiastically, I might add, as though they know something that you don’t - is ‘where are you heading?’. And every time I would get asked this I’d crumble under the implied existentialism poised within.

I didn’t even have an answer. All I could do was smile, limply, and say ‘nowhere’. And so I stopped leaving the house. I did laps of the living room instead. The cat would watch me from the couch out of just the one sleepy eye as if he were the warden in charge of my suicide watch.

The cat will save me, I thought. Imagine the headlines.

Then recently, I got a job. The timing was lucky, here. I’d just re-learnt how to brush my teeth more than once a day, and shower in the mornings, and how to cook a meal that wasn’t just toast smeared with the leftover remnants of grease from the chip pan. 

If I had a beard, I would have probably shaved it off at this point. 

This job involves a daily commute on two different trains. The idea of this terrified me. I hate confined spaces. And I loathe people. I imagined myself sitting next to every psycho and pervert going. All the lonelies and drunks and conspiracy theorists. It didn’t matter that it was 8am. These people didn’t sleep. 

I waited for something to happen on that train for weeks. I’d clamber on and hide behind my book, shifting my gaze suspiciously between crammed on commuters and men who managed to take up two entire seats just so that their balls could rest comfortable in the sprawl (or so I imagine). 

But there was nothing. People didn’t talk. They didn’t even look at each other. It didn’t matter how packed the train got, people found a way to avoid each other: they avoided physical contact, they avoided eye contact, they snarled in disapproval at the lone couple of women who rode the train together each morning and made loud, banal conversation in the middle of the carriage. 

I thought, fuck me! This is it! The World’s finally caught up! An entire commute of misanthropy. I love it on that goddamn train. 

Just yesterday I was sat opposite a woman eating a bag of crisps for breakfast. The train was jammed. There was barely any seats. Next to her was an average sized man reading the paper. He had his legs spread open so wide that he took up the entirety of the exit space. One leg wedged underneath my seat and another angled right out into the aisle. 

She ate her crisps and stared anxiously at his foot. Her stop was coming up. You could tell because she started to pull on her bag strap - the international implication that you should move the hell out of the way and let a sister leave the train - and had finally lifted her gaze up from off the floor.

The man did not move. He turned a page of his newspaper and resumed his home comforts. The woman stood up. She was still eating her crisps. She stared forlornly at the man. And then the sadness turned to anger. And then she poured the remnants of the bag of crisps, and the bag, onto his leg. The wrapper fell onto his foot and remained there for the rest of the journey. 

She climbed over him and walked off. 

Nobody said anything. The man, especially, covered in crisp crumbs and someone else’s empty crisp packet, said nothing. He didn’t even move. 

And then it occured to me. That depression, all those months seeing nobody and eating crisps for dinner and confining myself to the cramped, comfortable carriage of a tightly tucked in bed whilst I suffered the residue of bad music from the neighbours flat beneath me. It was all just a part of the training. 

For about six or so years I worked in the same art gallery cafe, on and off. To my mind it was probably one of the best jobs I ever had. It was a job with barely any responsibility, where coffee could be pilfered freely and generously between customers and where the staff were allowed, and often encouraged, to play whatever music they wanted (within reason). Obviously, all of these perks got widely abused. The coffee flowed freely, and the ample caffeine buzz propelled us between sufferable hangovers into showy displays of off kilter, improvised dance routines between dish collecting and shoving piles of food at people.

Naturally, we had our fans, the same way a bright light will repeatedly attract the dumbest of flies, but we also had a brigade of haters. Mostly, it goes without saying, middle aged women who didn’t much appreciate us flaunting our youth in their faces as if in some monstrous brag. 

I quit the job quite a few times, always to return completely gratified that there actually wasn’t anything better out there. This whole thing happened somewhere towards the end of job quit #3, which was to be my final departure. 

The entire week had began suitably with a Sunday morning shift in which we were left to clean up the blood of some fighting smackheads who had roughed up a pregnant member of their pack within the building. Police were called and an ambulance turned up and quickly ferried the trouble away, leaving us with half an hour to scrub smeared blood stains off tables, window panes and door handles. 

I was putting the final blood soaked rag into the bin when a disorderly queue had formed punctually at 11:00 when the place was officially open for business. In the back room - a cube about the size of a National Express coach toilet where we’d wash dishes and scream in solitude - the two other members of staff were still wiping tears away from their faces and folding their hands into their armpits to try and reduce how much they were shaking. 

A small middle class family with lots of money to waste ordered a veritable breakfast feast, but with everything altered to suit their sense of entitlement and to push serving time back by an extra ten minutes between customers. Which obviously queued up the predictable onslaught of future customer complaints like a backed up sewage tank. 

Fuck this, I thought, and began entertaining myself once more with romanticised ideas of unemployment involving a grandiose notion of being a rough and tumble writer, living off whisky and late night S&M writing sessions with a typewriter. Which never happens. When you have that much free time, you end up with nothing to fill it with. 

A few mornings later my least favourite customers charged into the place. It was 8:00am and these women - from the brigade of haters I mentioned earlier - seemed to relish being up this early and have other people feeding them.

They all worked for the health service in a building not far from the cafe. It was one of those places with banners demonstrating the effects of a bad diet, and bemoaning binge drinking, smoking, and obesity. Enormous human beings who looked robust enough to survive every suicide attempt they tried, with sad, dewey eyes and frowns that sagged like a warped piece of plastic over a washing line stood next to these signs chain smoking, presumably just waiting to die. 

These women would make the same order every morning. Dozens of rounds of toast, but only wholemeal because they were all on diets, with small smears of butter scraped onto the insides. Do that wrong and they’d be back to bludgeon you with their eyeballs. 

One woman in particular used to come in near enough every day and order the same enormous sandwich, with the same enormous slice of cake, topped off with a skinny latte and a diet coke. She was a large looking woman with the kind of absolute disdain for humanity that was revealed in her reverence for complaining loudly and constantly, and for making her opinion of you clear from how she consumed your entire being with her spongey, disparaging eyes. 

She had a small moustache of sweat above her upper lip at all times and she ran out of breath in the middle of a sentence so that all of her orders were full of an anti-climactic suspense. 

I’d like a…sausage and brie…sandwich but not…toasted with extra….pesto and butter and…a skinny latte and die-….-t coke.

This day it wasn’t any different. She was in there with a mate from work, the two of them talking loudly, their phones clutched importantly in their hands, their overpriced bags full of miniature mars bars and unimportant important documents swinging with every dramatic gesture. 

We had two pieces of wholemeal bread left. They wanted 20 pieces of toast. I shouted in their general direction, but instead of turning to look at me the woman with the sweat moustache wafted her hand and made a shooing gesture at me like I was something that had just been shat out of the sky. 

I toasted white bread. I slammed enormous globules of butter into the middle of each piece. I spread that shit until each piece was dripping so badly that I had to double bag their order to keep the takeaway bags from breaking. I left it on the counter for them to pick up. I turned my mix CD up and resumed my well practiced routine of cafe-counter-karaoke. For one. 

I completely forgot about the whole thing until a few days later when the place received a lengthy complaint emailed by an anonymous pack of customers. Amongst the spectacular 1’000 word count were excerpts like this:

We’re all on incredibly strict diets in which it is IMPERATIVE that our needs are met. When we ask for wholemeal bread, we’re not being cute - some of us don’t have the luxury of being in our twenties and able to flounce around a cafe in our hot pants dancing to chart hits - we have genuine health problems which your waitresses are either too stupid or too ignorant to get right. 

And:

You have a staff of imbeciles. A pack of young girls hired only for their looks and not their ability to do any sort of job well. Shame on you! They spend so much time staring at themselves in the chrome of the milk steamer that our lattes are regularly over steamed and actually BURNED which is ridiculous considering the prices you charge. These girls are a pack of ARROGANT, SELF OBSESSED, BIMBOS!!!!!!!!!!!!

Which, in fairness, was at least a half truth. 

I pretended to know nothing about it, except that we should frame the email for exhibition on the front counter to excuse us from any future complaints. My idea was that we could simply just tap this exemplary piece of writing and go ‘I think you can read right here, in the third line of paragraph six that we were actually only ever hired for our looks, so if you want better service then you should try somewhere with uglier waitresses’. 

My idea was rejected. We had to get staff training. The free coffee stopped. The in-house DJ sessions were taken away from us. I was told to never wear my hot pants again and to stop dancing suggestively to Britney Spears’ greatest hits CD as a way to make more tips on a Friday night. 

And I quit. I stayed the course even when I was on my hands and knees scrubbing the smeared blood of warring drug users off the surfaces, but take away my hot pants and my inappropriate ass shimmies and we’ve got problems. 

Those women were right.
 

The idea that all restaurants are family friendly, is a lie. Anywhere in which the booze can flow freely, and tables of perishing adults can celebrate things with food that staring into a clock face contemplating mortality whilst eating a bag of bon bons can also achieve, is a sure fire way to terrify and alienate pre-adults. 

This place only had a single stall for the ladies. Just the one piss pot offering for the entire establishment of lady hygiene emergencies; the kind of thinking that you presume was undertaken by a man, or possibly an incredibly vindictive female in upper management. Just the one stall. With a broken lock. 

I was breaking in some new trainers at the time. They had a unicorn on them somewhere and a plastic bubble filled with liquid on the side of each shoe which was needless save for the fact that to my seven year old brain they had the potential for magic. Of course they did. I just had to figure out the manner in which it needed to pressed, the thought process required to go with it, and then who knows. The possibilities were endless. 

I ran through the restaurant, leaving my seat in an excitable and desperate cacophony of squeaks and thumps - my new trainers presenting me to the packed out eatery as something of a tiny sports superstar. That’s right, I thought to myself, You aren’t mistaken, guys. I really am that amazing. Check out my new trabs.  

And I ran straight to the lone toilet stall. I kicked the door open. I flung in.  I froze.

There, right in the corner, sandwiched between the porcelain of the piss seat and the toilet roll holder were two women huddled together, facing the wall. 

I waited for them to acknowledge me. But they didn’t. I began to worry about how long I could hold the piss in for. I worried for my new trainers. 

The younger woman, who I presumed was the daughter in the scenario, was sobbing uncontrollably. She had the presence of a tumultuous, flailing plane - a small explosion in mid air, and now this, a noise that overburdened the drama of the mechanics and the passengers within. The older woman - the mother - was holding her daughter’s head and pressing tissue to her face. She too, was sobbing. But silently, as though someone had muted her soundtrack. 

What am I going to do, though? The daughter sobbed. It’s too late now, I can’t stop anything, I can’t change…

Every word was insistent with syllables that quivered and held for protracted beats like an amateur sonata. 

You can’t think like that. You need to do what’s right for you. He’s no good, if I’d have known that…I wish I’d known earlier. I wish I’d known…

The mother added, her voice stable and supportive - a solid beam - right up until the final few words, when it crumbled back into her breathy, static silence. 

I hadn’t ever been prepped to know what to do in this situation. Did I need to go over and help? Was it okay to simply use the toilet and ignore them both? They were obviously talking about a man. I knew that much, because I watched a lot of TV and this was a common occurrence  I thought long and hard about what I knew about men and came up with the fact that they rarely ever dressed like women, they had deep voices, and they were terrible dancers. None of this seemed useful.

I can’t go back out there. Not with everyone still here. No-one else knows! How can I…? I just don’t know…what…Oh, MUM! The daughter wailed once more. 

The mother moved away from her a little to grab some more toilet roll off the wall when she spotted me, jumping immediately with fright. She tapped her daughter on the shoulder and pointed her head towards me. 

They both stared at me for a while. They’d stopped crying. 

I’m sorry, did you need to use the toilet? The mother asked. 

I nodded. 

Okay. Well, just pretend we’re not here. In fact, we’ll even turn to face the wall so we can’t see anything…is that okay?

I nodded again, but I wasn’t sure. It all felt a little weird. I pulled my pants down and sat in position. I tried to piss but my whole body locked up. 

Can you two maybe carry on talking for a while? Or put your fingers in your ears? It’s just that I…well, I can’t go. I don’t want you to hear me. I stated matter of fact and with the authority of a kid with potential magic in her shoes. 

They both laughed. They were laughing! I fixed everything!

And then I finally pissed. Quite possibly the longest wee in existence. The mother and daughter remained huddled in the corner. They had their fingers in their ears but when I looked over at them I could see them taking them out of them every now and then to see if I was still using the toilet. Which I was. I’d drank three pints of lemonade that night. It was a big night for me.

I began to hate the situation. I wanted my body to empty itself immediately or for those two to find somewhere else to cry. The kitchen, maybe? Or what about the car park? Maybe just go home? But don’t stay here. I pressed the buttons on the side of my shoes and thought about them disappearing. They didn’t. I pressed them again and thought about myself being at my table with my family. I stayed on the toilet seat. 

I pressed them one last time and thought about fixing everything that made people everywhere cry, particularly the ones who clogged up bathroom stalls with their dramas, so that kids everywhere could relieve themselves in peace. 

I pulled my pants back up. Flushed. And ran back to my table. I was no longer a sporting superstar. I was just a kid getting in everyones way. 

My mum shares the same birthday as the Queen. On her birthday we’d all tussle into my dads car and drive somewhere for a celebratory bite. The route was always the same, the ornamental semi-detached houses that barricaded our own humble little streets into place, coming into view less than a minute into driving. 

A lot of them had bold, bragging and pretentious plaques outside these houses with self-penned titles for the building like ‘The Manor’ or ‘La Maison’. Others were less grandiose and opted for saccarine declarations like ‘Home Sweet Home!’ or ‘Love Resides’. I used to think long and hard about what our own house could be called, but the thought process only led me to self-loathing and I decided that no, I was content with just having a number.

It was on my mums birthday one year, soon after joking about her links to the monarchy - how secretly her birthday implied that she was born of blue blood - that I noticed a woman in one of these houses, stood proudly outside her own house.

She was dressed in a white, lacy ensemble replete with a small blue cardigan, and on her head was a modest tiara. Her arm was raised at a right angle to her body and her hand made a robotic wave that looked as though she was spinning a bowl on the tips of her fingers. At her feet were two or three little yapping Corgi dogs and the sign to the house read ‘The Palace’. 

I couldn’t make this up if I tried. 

‘Is that…?’ I asked, stupefied, leaving my mum to fill in the blanks.

‘The Queen? No. She only thinks she’s The Queen. Quite sad really. She’s not well. I always see her down the shops in her tiara buying up all the best meat’. 

‘So…It’s her birthday, too, then?’

‘Probably not. Only myself and The Queen share today as a birthday, and that’s a fact’, she joked.

‘Doesn’t The Queen have two birthdays though?’ The ridiculousness of that notion only sank in at that precise moment. Two birthdays? So we’re to believe that she was born twice? Is that what made you royalty? What was she, an alien? 

‘Yep. Two birthdays. She’s the only person in the whole country who gets to celebrate herself twice’.

‘So she gets two loads of presents? And two parties?’

‘Exactly. How do you think she got so rich?’

In my head the logic was simple, this other woman - this local Queen - today was her second birthday, and presumably her real birthday fell on the actual Queen’s pretend birthday. I shared my logic to the car.

‘Your brain is working far too hard on this one’, my Dad chimed in, ‘She’s just a bit ill, that woman. She isn’t really The Queen’.

I gazed out the window some more as we sat in traffic. A succession of car horns were bleating, not because of the standstill, but obviously because of The Queen. The local one. 

The woman kept this up for years. I’d see her in the toiletries section of Home and Bargain, her tiara slightly eschew. I’d see her trimming the roses in her front lawn. Some years we wouldn’t see her at all and her house appeared ghostly and run down, an impostor. It appeared totally devoid of life, save for a little Corgi face in the window. 

The local Queen was beguiling to me. I presumed many theories concerning her, including one that conjectured that she was in fact the real monarch. That she’d grown tired of all the monarchy bullshit, and of seeing everyone else with less when she had too much, and had swapped places with a middle class woman from Allerton. 

Hers were the authentic mannerisms. The original Corgi admirer. The true wearer of the crown. And here she was pricing up toilet rolls in the local store. What a honour!

She’d appear on all of my mums birthdays. Which were, of course, her birthday too. Albeit a pretend one - the real birthday, presumably, of the woman she’d swapped places with, which was why The Queen actually celebrated twice. There she’d be, stood outside of her house providing an appearance for her people.

‘She’s at it again’, my mum would say, each year her voice growing more and more weary at the spectacle. 

And then one year, it stopped. The house was no longer called ‘The Palace’. It was just a number. The corgi’s no longer stared out from the window. Instead, a woman with threadbare hair and no tiara would stumble about cutting grass and looking forlorn. Sometimes she was even wearing sweatpants. 

It’s finally happened, I thought, they’ve finally done it. The Queen’s been overthrown. 

The last time we ventured to Chinatown, in the wee early hours of a rare and brave outing to Liverpool city center on a Saturday night, we got there just in time to witness a gang of drunken Scousers getting kicked out of a restaurant.

The scene went down something akin to those in Westerns where a gunfight breaks out in the central square and every business in the vicinity boards up their windows and locks down all the doors. As soon as one restaurant kicked the reckless out and shuttered it’s doors down for the night, the others followed in precise synchronicity.

This time was a Sunday evening. Safe, we thought. All the usual terrors we seek to avoid we will be slobbered up in front of an Eastenders omnibus, perilously shivering off the cocaine from the night before and live reporting their hangovers to Facebook.

How naive.

Within minutes of settling on a suitable eatery and sitting ourselves down, a couple in their early thirties charge into the joint. The bloke is wearing a creased curry stained t-shirt and a pair of tracksuit bottoms with a visible hole in the crotch whilst his girlfriend has actually thrown an entire ensemble on. She has, however, got one eyebrow drawn higher than the other leaving her face in a permanent expression of bewildered doubt.

As the waiter approaches the man announces, with authority, She’ll have a wine. She’s a wine girl. I’ll have a, err…a small beer.

The girl lets out a heavy sigh and corrects him instantly by mumbling, A lemonade, please.

He looks at her sadly, and says once more to the waiter as he sits down, A large beer for me actually. Not a small one.
They quickly order an enormous feast. Adding items onto their bill as if attempting to one up the others hunger. At the end of the list the woman asks for ‘Some of them soft crackers, too’.

They’re like giant Quavers, she tells her fella, excitedly.

They sit in an awkward and slightly disheveled silence. The man puts one of the napkins arranged on the table into triangles on top of his head and unleashes a lone chuckle. He swipes it off just as fast and grabs his girlfriend’s hand before peering around for where his food is.

Shit! He bellows, suddenly. What time is it, love?

He throws his hands up onto his head in a panic as his girlfriend tells him that it’s just gone past 8.

The Asda’ll be closed by now, won’t it?! Sunday hours! We didn’t pick up any oil or cream or owt…!

For what? Oh…

His girlfriend puts her i-phone down for the first time in minutes and stares affectionately at him.

For a massage, like?

Yeah! It’s Sunday, like. Love me Sunday massage. Ah shit, love. What are we gonna do?

Calm down, She tells him, There’ll be a mini market or a garage open somewhere that’ll sell baby oil till late. Failing that I’ve got loads of Sunflower oil in ours. It’ll be fine.

SUNFLOWER OIL.

An older, quiet couple sat behind them put their cutlery down and stop eating for a moment overhearing the conversation. The woman excuses herself for the toilet, glaring at the baby oil lovers as she passes.

To add even more merriment to the occasion a gaggle of drunken women enter the place and sit behind us.

IT’S FUCKING FREEZING IN ‘ERE! One of them shouts. ME NIPPLES!

Another, attempting to silence her foghorn friend says quietly, Look, it’s fine. Let’s just move to that table there, away from the door.

They move and the foghorn woman continues blaring the contents of her countless thought patterns to the entire restaurant. Her friends look exhausted. They sit in silence and let her chat away, probably hoping that at some point her infinite chatter will deprive her brain of just enough oxygen that she’ll pass out face first into her soup starter. And drown.

She doesn’t. Instead we’re all treated to an inane and impossibly loud blabber. Most of it recounts about Z-list celebrities that she knows and scandals about various footballer’s wives that she saw first hand in that club that no-one likes. There’s an entire monologue about what actually makes a person racist (murdering a black person, apparently) between bites of what she calls Chink cuisine. He said this. She said that. And you’ll never guess what happened next.

The baby oil couple next to us are onto their main meal by now. Their table is full to the brim with bowls, plates and platters which they sample small amounts of each from. The bloke checks the time, anxiously and murmurs non-seductively We best go in a minute, babe. We need to catch that shop by ours for the oil.

They leave soon after, three enormous bowls of noodles, fried rice and assorted dead things in sauces left nearly untouched.

We leave soon after, too. The foghorn woman is on her third glass of wine by now and is, somewhat impossibly, getting louder by the second.

Tomorrow these same people will likely sit on their toilets and read sensationalist Daily Mail headlines about immigrants in a sweaty outrage. They’re stealing our jobs! They don’t speak the language! They want to eat our children! etc. etc.

Meanwhile, I can only hope that there’s a local Chinese equivalent that features sensationalist headlines about monstrous Scousers infesting all the best Chinese restaurants. Kick them out! They don’t even speak English! They turn up in tracksuits and drink all the wine!

I find myself slowing down to a glacial pace. Snails overtake me. An empty can of cheap cola rattles past me and stops just in front of the girl walking a few steps ahead of me.

She pauses and kicks it gently out of the way, throwing her hands into her pockets and pulling her tiny, padded hood up over head - which is embroidered with bold purple daisies. She turns around and braves a glance in my general direction. 

I throw her a supportive half smile like some grotesque self-appointed matriarch of the pavement. Just behind us is a pack of teenage boys. Two of them have grabbed another by the shoulders and are trying to push him into oncoming traffic. They all laugh. A car nearly swerves into another trying to avoid them. 

It’s times like this I wish I had thought bubbles that I could send out there into the periphery like a drifting phone text - a little brain cloud shouting DON’T WORRY. JUST DRIVE INTO THEM. 

There’s a lot of honking of horns. Even the teenage boys are honking, like geese or those cheap bits of noise men use in football stadiums as a substitute for social skills. HONK.

The girl up ahead of me has quickened pace. She’s pulled her hands out of her pockets now and has pulled her phone up to her ear as though in conversation with someone even though she clearly isn’t. In fact, there’s not even a back to the phone. Just a bare battery. It’s there as a prop like those fake alarm boxes people attached to their houses in the 80’s to ward off potential burglars. 

In her other hand is her keys. I can see the jagged end of one peeping out from between her fingers the way prisoners conceal shivs in the showers. 

The teenage boys, clearly bored now with posing potential threats to themselves, each other, and everyone else have stopped dead in the pavement. I can hear one of them telling the rest that his dinner will be ready and he needs to go home, otherwise his ma will kill him. The rest of the boys take the piss out of him until a few others murmur in agreement about their own home positions. One of them is having pizza. Only a fool would miss out on pizza night. 

They disperse the way flocks of birds too, all at once and in separate but similar directions, when all the good garbage has been finally pecked from the floor.

The girl in front of me glances briefly behind her and puts her phone and her keys back in her pocket. She catches my eye momentarily and looks embarrassed by the whole thing. I throw her the same half smile from earlier and shrug my shoulders. 

We continue walking in the same direction for a while, me and her. I wonder where she can be going so late and on her own. Where her friends or family are to walk about with. Every now and then she breaks into song - a minuscule, choir girl voice meandering through several songs at once. She picks leaves off bushes. She jumps into puddles. Sometimes she bangs out a drumbeat against her coat as she’s singing. 

Maybe she just has nowhere else to sing. 

We only have two pans in the kitchen. Every time I get really hungry, I think to myself, ‘I should probably go cook something’. But then I’d need to wash the dishes. We’ve only two pans in the kitchen. And I either can’t afford the seven quid for a cheap, crappy new one or I just plain don’t want to waste my money on something so trivial. 

Or clean. Most importantly. I was promised self-cleansing pans in the future, and it is now the future. Fuck you, Judy Jetson. 

I’ve sold many things over the years in order to pay the bills. But none of them my words. Most recently it was an Nikon SLR Camera - my third eye, my bow, my shooting gallery. The man in the shop handled it the way I imagine horny old men to handle nubile, young hookers.
Perfect condition. Great action. I can tell you really loved it.
Is what he said. 

He gave me 80 quid for it. 

A part of me wished that I’d have just sold my body, instead. 

I peruse fashion blogs when I’m hungry. For the most part they’re all the creation of incredibly privileged, rich, white teenage girls. They all have top of the range SLR camera’s and use them to document how privileged, rich and white their lives are. 

Here I am in Stockholm. 

Here I am in L.A.

Here is a variety of fast food I’ve eaten recently. 

Here is a variety of gourmet food that I’ve eaten recently.

This is what first class air travel looks like, bitches. 

Here I am front row at Meadham Kirchoff.

Here’s my recently bought swag!

Here’s some more of my recently bought swag!

This is me in my new cute outfit. 

This is me in the same outfit but as a GIF.

Here is a bunch of unrelated, artsy stuff that my dad tells me will help to get me into arts school. 

This is a zine I made which my dad funded the production of. Chloe Sevingy writes a guest piece for it! 

And so on.

I long for their blogs. I could attempt to make a similar one myself, but it would plainly just be a daily, itemised list of everything I need and do not have. 

Top of the list would be that goddamn pan. 

And I think that defies the purpose of fashion. 

BORN.

APPLIED FOR SHIT LOADS OF JOBS.

DIED.

It wasn’t a very flash internet forum. There were no colour schemes or logos, there were no GIF avatars by people’s usernames when they posted or replied, or even photos for that matter. It was just box after box, and words after words. You couldn’t even post animated emoticons to express sadness, happiness, sauciness or the classic ‘I’m only joking, Christ!’.

I don’t know for certain but I’m pretty sure I was the youngest woman on there, and we were all women. From their usernames alone I could gather that they were all essentially over 50, and the majority of them well into their 60’s and 70’s - many of them using the local library to communicate with the rest of the World and speaking in online hushed tones: italics, tiny fonts and self-constructed abbreviations. 

Which is odd considering that really, when it came down to it, the thing that we were talking about wasn’t all that embarrassing. Although it was obviously so embarrassing and so niche that I had to hunt a place out online to talk about it, and obviously I’m not saying what it is to you.

It isn’t anything kinky, or even sexy for that matter. We all agreed we weren’t into that - Beatrice, in particular, would talk quite often about the internet being ‘a debris of the smut in other people’s minds’ and how she wanted no part of it. None of us did. But we all did something for our husbands that we couldn’t tell our sisters, co-workers or real life friends about. It was ridiculously specific, and simple for that matter, but we couldn’t just pop into a chemist and tell the woman behind the till and ask her to recommend some lotions or other supplements to aid our late night act. 

The women on that forum were so creative, too. They recommended new ways to approach the act and actions to make it easier. One of them had tailored 7 sets of pyjama bottoms (one for each night of the week) in a specific way to make the act near effortless. Another was making a cream in her bathroom using raw materials that acted as a deodoriser, disinfectant and lotion - a 3-in-1 combo that aided everyones comfort. Ethel - my favourite - had drawn a useful ‘How To…’ guide for beginners including one panel that showed what definitely NOT to do and what happened if you did.

We’d take on each other’s advice, we’d share out our own, we’d return week after week with more feedback for each other like the lead testers of a focus group who felt they were this close to unlocking the secrets of the universe. 

And then one day we had a surprise visitor on the forum. A man. He wrote a succinct and heartbroken post about his wife, Ethel (or as we precisely knew her - Ethel1945) who had ‘just passed, peacefully, in the middle of the act’. He wrote it as though Ethel had left the stage in the middle of a monologue, like we didn’t know what she was doing or what she was into. We wanted to say ‘It’s okay, we’re all friends here, we all know what you you enjoyed and how much she enjoyed doing it for you. You can say it out loud! You don’t have to call it ‘an act’! Call it how it is, fella! Be proud!’. But it all felt in poor taste. 

Before we all left the forum, for good, Ethel’s husband returned one last time with the final of Ethel’s ‘How To…’ guides. It was a panel showing a  ’What Not To Do…!’ diagram. It was something that she herself had done, just days after drawing about how much of a big no-no it was.

‘This is how my beloved Ethel died. I just thought you should all know. Be careful and look after you and yours. She would have wanted me to warn you’. 

It kind of put me off after that. I made sure to invest more of my time in pointing my husband towards specific online forums where he could learn more about the things that I liked. But communicating through a middleman - a little electronic box full of strangers - it just seemed silly. He’d return with the most vulgar of ideas, the most obscene suggestions. A debris of the smut in other people’s minds, tied up with a bow and passed on as a gift.