Medway

David Cramer Smith

Description

Jamie Sinclair is a bipolar ex-chav, an impostor knocking at the door of the middle class.On a whim he decides to leave his toxic relationship and move back to his parents' house, to see if his hometown can fix him.But three questions need to be answered:Can he be fixed?Can a place fix someone?And what does it mean to be fixed?

Informations

• Publié par: The Conrad Press
• Date de parution: 28 avril 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781912924912
• Langue: English

Extrait

MEDWAY
David Cramer Smith


Medway
Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2019
Tel: [phone] 
 www.theconradpress.com 
 [e-mail]
ISBN 978-1-912924-91-2
Copyright © David Cramer Smith, 2019
The moral right of David Cramer Smith to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.


Part One
‘The rain falls hard on a humdrum town.’


1
S oon, I will flee Manchester.
Soon, I will forcibly dislocate myself from my own life, a shoulder popping itself out of its socket, loosening itself free.
Joyous, burning pain.
It’s July 2008. I’m almost twenty-five years old.
It’s been nothing but Manchester since starting university at eighteen and that’s too much.
I no longer love/like my girlfriend.
My boss and most of my co-workers are a bunch of shitfucks.
I’ve finally realised that Morrissey is... no longer the Morrissey of The Smiths.
Kill your idols.
So I will relinquish my dignity and return to my parents’ place in the Unitary Authority of Medway.
I could go anywhere in the world.
I could go and live in the desert in New Mexico and become a student of the wind.
Live like a shaman in the jungles of Peru, learning how to listen to the plants.
Leave society and become a hermit, to try and fix my broken, bipolar brain.
But no.
I’ll be going to Rainham, my dead-from-the-neck-up hometown, in England, my dead-from-the-neck-up country.
Soon.


2
A lice and I have increased the frequency of our loud, drunken, public arguments.
Our relationship has decayed.
Three years we’ve been together, renting a tiny, bland flat fifteen storeys up in a modern high-rise block.
Bleak, uninspiring architecture.
Shoddily built, cheaply appointed, over-priced.
The grubby Manchester rain quickly managed to besmirch the facades of the building, ageing it beyond its years, like the sallow face of a sixty-a-day chain-smoker.
But Alice and I were happy there for a while.
When we moved in we set about cosying up the place with all our stuff. We put fairy lights around the headboard of our bed; blu-tacked unframed posters of bands we loved all over the walls; plastered the fridge with photos from our student days; put fancy, artisanal handwash in the bathroom.
We bought houseplants. So many houseplants.
We nurtured them like children.
We were pretending to be grown-ups and it was fun.


3
I t was a mutual friend from university, Deb, who match-made us.
I was a year older than Alice and had almost finished my Politics degree; Alice was in her second year.
I wasn’t looking for a girlfriend.
When Deb broached the topic I told her I was knuckling down to my dissertation. I didn’t tell her that I was still hung up on my ex-girlfriend from the sixth-form, Caitlin Gilberthorpe.
But Deb was persistent.
‘She’ll civilise you,’ Deb said. ‘She’s out of your league but somehow you’ve caught her eye. She saw you the other day at the student union and asked me about you. I lied of course. If she knew the truth she’d run a fucking mile.’
‘I’m not a monster,’ I said.
‘You’re a gentle savage,’ she said, patting my head.
‘Exactly. A rough diamond.’
‘Charcoal, then.’
‘Same difference. Carbon-based.’
‘Just remember to shower before you go out with her, that’s all I ask. And maybe get an STI check.’
I stood up and looked proudly into the distance. ‘I won’t change who I am for anybody!’
‘I will hose you down, Jamie, so help me.’


4
I met Alice at a ‘Chav Night’ in a nightclub in the city.
I didn’t know it was Chav Night so I wore my usual lacklustre clobber.
Everyone else was dressed up. A lot of boys had on ‘Burberry’ baseball caps, Ralph Lauren polo shirts with the collars turned up, heavy gold chains around their necks, sleeper rings. Girls had ‘Croydon Facelift’ hairstyles, hypertrophied gold hoop earrings, velour tracksuits.
Garage music pulsed through the club, rattling my ribcage.
People were mindlessly grinding against each other.
It was like I was back in Medway at Bar Rio with my old friends from school. Except this was ‘ironic’. This was middle-class students taking the piss out of the commoners.
Deb screamed and hugged me when I found her on the dancefloor with some of our friends. She held me at arm’s length and looked me up and down. ‘Babe! What the fuck are you wearing! It’s supposed to be fancy dress! Nevermind. There’s someone I want you to meet.’
She yanked me off the dancefloor towards a group of people idly moving to the music and sipping drinks with straws.
‘This is Alice Green. She’s in my International Relations class. Alice, this is Jamie Sinclair.’
‘Hi,’ said Alice. ‘I see you’re also against the idea of dressing up to mock the underclass.’
‘Yaaawn,’ said Deb. ‘It’s just a bit of fun. And I make this shit look good.’
She struck a pose.
‘At the expense of those less fortunate than us,’ said Alice.
‘All right, all right, I’m an evil bitch,’ said Deb, stabilising herself by holding Alice’s shoulder and leaning in to plant a wet-looking peck on her cheek. ‘I’ll leave you two humourless babes to get to know each other. I’m gonna bag me a hooligan.’
She put her empty glass on a nearby table and moseyed back to the dancefloor.
I faced Alice. ‘I didn’t actually know it was fancy dress,’ I said. ‘If I had, all I would have needed to do was raid my old wardrobe back home. This is how I used to dress.’
‘I hope you’re not being flippant,’ said Alice.
‘I’m being... serious,’ I said.


5
T he next time we met was by chance at a house party.
A friend of a friend of mine was also a friend of a friend of Alice.
I was already tipsy when she arrived, but at least the venue was more conducive for conversation, unlike last time.
She came over to say hi. Full of uninhibited bravado I told her I wanted to kiss her before the night was over.
She touched my arm and laughed, then went to talk to some friends.
Drunken idiot. I’d blown it.
Except I hadn’t.
She found me towards the end of the night and led me upstairs to an empty bedroom, where we lay on the floor and kissed, and that’s it, because we didn’t have protection.
It was okay though.
I knew we’d meet again.
We had an immediate, intense connection, and for the next few days I thought of nothing else but her.


6
A nd Alice had thought of nothing else but me, apparently.
That’s what she said when we met for coffee in the student union later in the week.
I was unlike anyone she’d ever met, she said.
I told her the same thing. It was almost true.
Alice wasn’t anything like Caitlin.
Which is to say she looked a lot like Caitlin (undeniably beautiful) but had blonde hair rather than brown.
Which is to say she’d also been head girl at her high school (but had gone to a private school rather than public).
A few things set Alice apart: she had dimples; she went on protest marches; she wore a Yo La Tengo t-shirt that she’d stolen from her older brother.
I focused on these differences as much as the similarities.
‘What are you doing for the rest of the day?’ she said.
‘I was going to stay here and drink coffee all day, reading this beast.’
I drummed a brief tattoo with two fingers on the hardback library book on the table before me.
‘Want to read it at mine? The coffee’s free there. Nescafé finest.’
‘That sounds… pretty good.’
‘Is that a yes then?’
‘Are you sure I wouldn’t be in the way? What about your housemates?’
‘Hundred per cent. They’ve both gone home to visit their clingy boyfriends and convince them they haven’t been sleeping around all this time. Come on. There’s a bus soon. We’ll make it if we go now.’


7
I n those early days the sex was there, was good.
When we were alone together, in a kind of comical way almost all physical contact between us culminated with nudity.
We might be in Alice’s lounge on the settee, reading our respective textbooks, then one of us would rub the other’s knee, and then we’d be naked, doing it right there, hoping her housemates wouldn’t come downstairs for another few minutes.
In bed, if I was big spoon, Alice would do this kind of super slow-mo twerk against me to indicate that it was time. I could never resist, even if I was half-asleep and had to get up early for a lecture.
She would do the slow-mo twerk thing in the middle of the night.
I would respond by dreamily nuzzling the place between her neck and shoulder.
Would sneak a sleepy, questing hand between her arm and ribs to find a terrific breast, then she’d reach behind and start rubbing me through my boxer shorts.
We knew how to make each other come.
Sixty-nine.
Ninety-six.
Fifty-five.
Pi.
All the sex numbers.
We skipped lectures to be together. We were hindering the growth of our minds and it felt great.
My fragile ego was boosted. I’d never been able to consistently satisfy another person before Alice: Caitlin found it difficult to climax and brought a lot of adolescent anxiety to sex (she wouldn’t take her top off and didn’t enjoy receiving oral sex); with other women it was hit and miss. So Alice and I kept doing it and doing it, delirious with youthful exuberance, and passion, and joy, and relief.


8
T here was all the other stuff as well.
I loved the smell of her Herbal Essences shampoo (it reminded me of Caitlin).
I enjoyed that she was smarter than me, and how equanimous she was about her intelligence.