Under the window you could hear these young folks barking in short quips and you didn’t know them and they passed in perhaps five seconds and then their voices were smothered with the walls of the next house and then they were gone and you never knew them anymore.

He could hear through the windows the wind that whooshed across the grey ocean and though there was no sense of colour in the noise it certainly was profound, along with the stinging cries of the gulls that swooped over the crags, and the sense of desolation that admiralled the span of water.

I went downstairs in the morning and noticed a bundle of letters under the letterbox and I sleepily picked them up; there were three letters in total and one was from the gas company and the other from the bank, and the third was a civilian letter, with my name on the front of it in handwriting. I noticed the handwriting immediately. And knew who it was from. And this flood of disgust flumed over me with the memories of this person. I knew that if I opened the letter there would be a torrent of garble inside, this load of self indulgent trash. And they would probably be wanting something from me: there would be some kind of agenda in there. And so what I did was put the gas company and bank letters into the kitchen to open them later, and then I took the other letter outside to the street bin. And I plopped it in that and shut the door on it with a slap. I went back inside and boiled the kettle for a cup of coffee.

Dylan changed after he met Carly and started going out with her. ///// I know that when folks fall for each other there is that crazy period where they’re all fondly and so on. And I was glad for him at first. ///// But then he stopped turning up to band practise so much. He would make up excuses that he was feeling ill or that he had to do course work at college. We knew it was bullshit, and that he was over at Carly’s. ///// Carly herself wasn’t that bad. She wasn’t somebody I would hang out with but she wasn’t a fiend. ///// So I can’t give her that wicked stepmother label. Or, the person that stole Dylan away from us. ///// But, Dylan was honestly a terrific drummer before we knew her. Before he met her. ///// Then when he turned up to practise he not only made too many mistakes, he was all drowsy and distracted. ///// About eight months after meeting Carly, he told us on our band group page, that he wasn’t interested in being part of the group anymore. I messaged him back one on one, begging him to reconsider. He said he’d made his mind up. He was going off to Europe with Carly, and that he didn’t think he was a good enough drummer anymore. ///// What made it worse was that we had booked gigs with him for the next month. So we had to quickly find a replacement. ///// Dylan eventually stopped with music altogether and he ended up having kids with Carly instead. ///// It was odd because when he was young he was super into Keith Moon and John Bonham and Mitch Mitchel: and he learned from them a lot. He was a terrific instrumentalist, I don’t exaggerate. ///// One girl that he met swapped his logic around. I suppose it was cool that he had kids and so on. Procreated. But, at what point did he lose all of his creativity? I don’t know how she invaded all of that and sucked it dry. Maybe I’m bitter that she did that. Ultimately, I’m sad that Dylan changed like that. And I miss turning around when we were on stage and seeing him thrash up the drumkit.

Only in Sex

He dated this girl a few years back. Who was super into kissing him. She really liked his face and she got a supreme kick out of holding his cheeks and kissing him on the lips and the neck and the arms, and, just anywhere she could think of. They’d go on dates, which she organised. Initiated, rather. Invited him to the cinema and out for food and to this French singer who was coming to town that she used to listen to.

And then she would invite herself back to his place. He had a flat in the city centre. He’d make her food. And she’d eat it up gladly and thank him. And then he would suggest that they watch a movie in the living room? He had a big TV? But, no, she wanted to go to the bedroom. And she would get undressed and would entice him under the covers.

He was awkward about sex. Because he’d never really had it before. He’d had girls in the past but he was still young and hadn’t had that much experience with proper sex. I.e., he wasn’t a virgin but he still didn’t quite know that much when it came to this topic, and when there is a body under you in a bed and you realise that this is actually happening, he got nervous and all of that prelude confidence from her kisses earlier on watered away. And, basically, he couldn’t get hard for long periods, and therefore couldn’t stick it up her.

So, she came around to the flat three times. And the first time it happened she said she didn’t mind. And she was cheerful and brushed away his apologies. The second time it occurred, she touched his penis a lot, because she thought that might encourage him to put it up her. But that didn’t work. And, on the third occasion she invited him into the shower because she hoped he would fuck her there inside the bathroom. But this was even more difficult than the bedroom. And then something snapped in her. She got fussed and suddenly couldn’t stand to be near him and didn’t feel like kissing him at all. This was in the morning and they both had to go to work. And even though they were going to the same place in town she wanted to walk a different way from him. He kissed her goodbye. His lips were acid on hers. He thought he’d done something wrong but was trying to remain jovial about what it was. And he watched her walking away from him.

About three weeks later she broke it off with him.

One of the reasons, she said, was that she thought all men were only interested in sex. “All guys want the same thing!” she declared. “And I won’t give you what you want.”

Hack Hack Hack

Mrs Madigan was a 24 year old primary school teacher. One day she took the class of kids on a daytrip to the pantomime show that was playing in the city. Cinderella. It was showing at one of the big halls in the city centre. And she had to take nearly 30 kids along to the theatre to see it.

They got in a hired coach and headed along. The kids were all cheery. Mrs Madigan liked these bits about her job – which she largely hated otherwise. When the children were all good spirited and she didn’t have to teach maths or projects about the rainforest or World War II or sexual reproduction.

But then she heard a coughing behind her on the bus. A violent cough, going hack hack hack.

The kids had been eating in the background with snacks they’d brought for the journey …

“Mrs Madigan!” she heard one of the girls shriek her name. And she turned. “Robbie’s hurt!”

She undid her seatbelt and got up. The driver was frowning at her in his mirror. And all the kids had gone silent and were watching her, and she marched down the hallway and came to his spot where Robbie was.

His coughing was the only noise inside the coach. Robbie clutched his throat and his eyes spilled with tears.

Mrs Madigan knew that Robbie had a serious nut allergy. She’d been told by his mother, and the school nurse that flagged such things up at the start of the year.

“Did somebody give Robbie nuts!” she asked the schoolchildren. The boy who was sitting next to Robbie had gotten out of his seat and was staring at him, and all of the surrounding kids in their seats were cowering, with bulged eyes. “Did Robbie eat any nuts? I think he might be having an attack!”

Mrs Madigan knew that Robbie had a syringe in his bag which he carried at all times. A pre filled syringe with adrenaline in it, that was to be used if indeed this crazy thing could happen. Only, she never thought that it would ever actually happen and it was happening now and all attention was her.

She knelt next to Robbie. He gasped and jumped and one of his tears splashed on her hand, as she went into his rucksack looking for the needle. “Where is your adrenaline syringe, Robbie! Where is it?” He couldn’t answer because he couldn’t breathe. She found a lunchbox and a bottle of juice and a jumper but there was no syringe. Then she looked in the top pocket. And inside found this very bashed-around cardboard box. Undid that. And pulled out a prickly plastic implement. One of the boys shrieked somewhere in the background.

Madigan had no clue what she was doing but she really had to do something. She tugged up the sleeve on Robbie’s arm and she aimed somewhere on the bicep and she had this syringe in her fingers and she almost forgot to ejaculate a little splash of it before injecting or else the oxygen would cause a blood clot and kill the patient … and she stabbed it into the skinny white-fleshed arm and then plunged down on the plunger.

[It turned out that the kids had been passing sweets around. Chocolate bars. Robbie already knew how to avoid Snickers bars, and things like that. Anything which had nuts in them. But one of the new chocolate items had nut content in the creamy bit: it was just that Robbie hadn’t experienced that one before. And he ate it and his body went into mayhem.

But, Mrs Madigan saved his life. The adrenaline went into his bloodstream and kicked his body back into a saveable state. They took him to a hospital.

Mrs Madigan was quite the heroine that day. It caused great social news throughout the kids, who spread it to their parents and it blushed across the playground and the tale became almost fantastical, that Madigan had saved the life of little Robbie.

Nobody even had to admit who had given the nut-content chocolate bar to Robbie. That was all glossed over and forgotten about.]

Pretty Goodbye

The musician Lewis C Fraser died. He was a songwriter. Popular. I knew him when he was younger before we stopped being friends. But I got invited to his funeral, by his mother.

I was surprised that she got in touch with me to invite me. Via social media, and then she asked to call. I was a bit nervous to speak to her, because I hadn’t seen her in six years, but I couldn’t really refuse.

“So when was the last time that you saw Lewis?” she asked me. Her voice was all small. I had to lie that I had seen him more recently than I actually had. And, in fact, I had tried to continue a relationship with Lewis but that he had been consistently disinterested and had basically stopped speaking to me altogether. Even though we lived in the same city and despite my knowing him since high school.

“I know Lewis was always fond of you,” she went.

“Yeah. Me with him, too.”

I saw about his suicide in the national news. He’d hanged himself in a cemetery up town, one of those plush cemeteries where they select superior skeletons to lie, over normal folks. Was that Lewis’ last attempt at vanity? To die there?

When I heard about it I was sad. But I thought I could’ve been sadder.

We used to see each other every week and we were often sat together on buses, riding about town, looking to score marijuana, that adolescent drug. And we’d play soccer, videogames, we’d go camping in the woods.

But, I mean, those are pretty normal teenage things and I don’t particularly feel so nostalgic about them. Lewis C Fraser changed very quickly after he went to this university in a seaside town. Where mostly rich kids went. He blended in with them and his character changed and then when he was with me, after that, he was obviously bored with my company. I get that people drift apart and sadly that’s what happens. But when I called him up to try and speak about something that had happened with me – good or bad – he didn’t have any wisdom or he just didn’t say anything.

There was one time when I got beaten up pretty severely in town. Lewis shrugged, and stood up and walked away from me, when I tried to speak to him about it.

His music took off when he was at university and then he quit uni to pursue his music and he went touring across Europe and his songs would play on the radio. Cool, yeah. I wasn’t that into his music, to be frank. And, frankly, if we were still mates I would have sent him gushing compliments on how good his tunes were. Meh.

I might sound like a heartless bastard. Of course I was upset that he killed himself.

He wasn’t alive anymore. That didn’t make him a reliable friend. So I didn’t wish to go to a funeral where all of these people would be weepily acclaiming how much of an angel he was … when this was not the case. And, so, I told his mother that I wouldn’t be able to come to the funeral. With a solid excuse. She said that that was okay. I said I would say a prayer for Lewis. And I did. A short one, on the spot. And then I ended the call after a pretty goodbye.

I remember going up to the supermarket when I was little.

And there was a pair of lads coming down the road towards me, with a group of girls. They were a little bit older and taller than me. I passed them and walked on. And then one of the boys called something after me.

I think he pointed to one of the girls and he said, “Do you fancy her?”

And I called something back: though I don’t remember what I said.

I walked on and got closer to the supermarket. And then I became aware of the couple of boys running behind me. I chose to ignore them, even though they were obviously chasing me.

And then one of them just thumped me right in the side of the head.

It was a right dazzling smack, at my temple. It didn’t knock me out and it wasn’t that painful: was rather stunning and unexpected.

I think this was the first time I’d been physically attacked in public before. And it happened right next to the motorway, with cars speeding by. But nobody stopped or got out to intervene.

All that happened was that the boy who hit me and his mate laughed in a guttural way and then they ran on away from me.

So it wasn’t like a proper ‘battering’ from them – they didn’t pound me in. The assault was that one quick stupid crack on the head and then they had accomplished their deed and ran away.

I started crying.

There seemed no other option to do.

I was only eleven. And at that age you can’t really control your tears when it comes to such a thing. So I started crying and then I went into the newsagent.

And I knew the newsagent owners. I was friends with them. They were lovely people; the Mahmoods, they were called. I’d see them each weekend to pick up the newspaper, etc, and sweets for me.

And, Mrs Mahmood, when I burst in crying, got all maternal and she asked me what was wrong etc.

I was embarrassed that I was emotional in front of her. As it is whenever you cry in public. But, she was sympathetic, and cared, and was concerned that I wasn’t all right.

I used to go down to Norfolk with my Dad in the summer holidays. To this little town called Diss, which only has a population of a few thousand.

One time, we were walking in the town centre, in the market area: and there was this young man who was busking. He must’ve been in his early twenties, and he was just busking. I wasn’t close enough to hear which songs he was singing.

But I did hear this younger lad – who would’ve been in his teens – who went up to the busker, and yelled in his face:

“YOU’RE BLOODY SHIT MATE!”

The lad was with his friends, and presumably showing off. But nobody laughed.

I was eight or nine at the time, and I thought it was mean. And I told my Dad about it. Hr said, “That’s not very nice,” in his calm way.

And then Dad and I went into one of the nearby shops. And got some items in there. The shop was maybe twenty yards away from where the busker was. Inside the shop we spent maybe five minutes finding something to eat.

And when we came back out, the busker had vanished.

He packed his guitar up and left, and wasn’t playing songs anymore.

And I thought it was doubly bad, because he’d taken offense to that one little brat who had insulted him. I’m sure he wasn’t bad.

I’ve busked myself when I was younger. Way younger than the man was above. And I remember getting a torrent of abuse from people walking by. The irony is that, if you were to hand the guitar to the abuser, and then ask them to stand up and sing in front of a street full of people, without a mic or amplifier, and then let them see how hard it is to do, they would feel very differently about their previous actions.

It's far easier to lob an insult at somebody rather than do what they’re doing. Is that why they do it?

There are way, way more critics than there are creative people. Because it’s far easier to be a critic than an artist. I’ve made this point many times on this blog in various posts.

But, even at the age of 8, or however old I was in that small town, I wanted to find the busker and tell him to come back and start playing again. What did one little runt have to do with his music? The runt didn’t have any bravery, and that’s why he was trying to damage the busker’s.

I wished that the busker had had a bit of nerve to defy that boy, and just keep on playing. That’s how you beat the critics. You simply keep up with your craft. It’s far cooler to be creative. And that’s as simple as it gets.

They were speaking downstairs in that

Hushed demented tone that he’d known

Since boyhood that meant something was

Worrying them but it was also slathered

Over with negativity and the slush of alcohol

And he knew that what they feared about

The future wouldn’t turn out the way

That they were afraid of and so he tried

Not to listen and headed on to the toilet

And tried to forget.

I’d gotten to the airport a bit earlier than I meant to. So I thought I’d stop into one of the bars for a beer – and I found this big corporate bar that offered the cheapest drinks, bought a beer and sat down. It was afternoon and so heaving busy. I took my laptop out and dabbled around on it. Most of the folks around me were young, and hooting with excitement at their trip. But there was this one couple nearby be who were totally out of place – versus the young people. They were around my age. That is, mid 30s. And they were stony and not speaking. And the man was dressed in a suit and the girl in a plush dress; it kinda looked like they were going to a wedding or a big event. But, honestly, I was there half an hour and neither of them spoke to each other once. The woman had an orange juice in front of her and the man wasn’t drinking anything. Neither of them even looked at their phones, or appeared to be doing anything. It was odd: it was like watching a mini movie in a huge room that was filled with a completely different movie. Because there were all of these jovial youngsters thrashing around them at the other tables and then there was them. It wasn’t that they were even that depressed looking. Because the man was real handsome and the woman super pretty. But you couldn’t tell what they were thinking altogether: there were no expressions to read from their faces. I got another beer after forty minutes or so. And then an hour passed and I needed a pee. So I nipped to the toilet. And when I came back – the couple had vanished from their table. They just weren’t there anymore. And I wildly looked around for them across the crowd, hoping they would reappear … but they had disappeared altogether. I thought maybe I had hallucinated them completely. Their table was quickly replaced by some younger woman who was reading a paperback. … I thought about that couple a lot, during my flight. They seemed like the kind of couple that you wanted to know; which was wacky on my part because things like couples don’t normally intrigue me. I suppose it was the mystery about them. What were they so serious about? And where were they going? I almost wished that, when I got up on the aeroplane to head to the toilet to pee, again, I might see them at the back of the plane sitting in the other seats. But, nothing happened. I never saw them again. Which is what mostly happens with folks when you go to airports.

Marv dropped out of high school early but he got a job working with his Uncle early too; and by the age of 20 he was living in the city centre in a nice flat and had a pulsing social life and at 24 was married with this amazing girl and they had a baby together; and at 30 he was the assistant manager of the business, and at 38, the manager, after his Uncle passed; and Marv took his kid to school each day and told her to watch out for bullies; and he made the dinner for the family when Mum wasn’t home; and he watched the hottest TV shows at night; and he voted for the popular candidate in the general elections but never got too animated when such topics came up in by the by chat; and Marv shut the news off whenever it got depressing; he didn’t smoke, and only got too drunk when weddings and parties made it acceptable to do so; and he cared about climate change but wasn’t too antagonised to do anything practical about it. Marvin died at 78, after complications with his heart. Lots of folks came to his funeral. His tombstone used to be frequented by flowers a decade back or so, and the grass has thickened around the stone, these days. He seemed to perish just before the world got a whole lot worse.

Fish on Toast

I always knew when she home because she always ate fish on toast. That was her meal. Mackerel or sardines, on toast. That strong smell would come up from downstairs. And there were sometimes when I couldn’t avoid going into the kitchen because I needed something … had to go in there. And she would never say hello. The radio would never be on. She’d just sit there at the table eating the fish on toast. She wasn’t a noisy eater. It was as if walking into a room with nobody there; or like she barely noticed that I’d entered it. I never quite sussed whether there was a proper grudge with her and me or whether there were no feelings on her side whatsoever. But, God, I found her terrifying. And that kinda inspired a phobic dislike for the smell of fish.

There was one time, now I think of it, when I was very young and I dropped something in the kitchen. And I made a great mess because the food spilled everywhere. Not fish; it was pasta and salad. Olives spilled everywhere. And she got mighty mad and made me sweep it all up with a brush and dustpan – and the brush got all greasy with the food, and I thought I might get an extra row for making the brush that way, too, so I hid the brush and pan back in the cupboard under the stairs.

I really don’t remember a single occasion when she asked me anything about my particular life. And I’ve worked with people like that in the past. How they unabashedly show no interest in you whatsoever. They just don’t care.

She had a stroke in her late fifties. And she lost the use of her right hand. But she kept her mental capacity and she would still come around to the house. I remember that brief post-stroke period, when she still came here. She would call me into the kitchen to help her make the fish on toast: because she couldn’t open the can by herself. I.e., she couldn’t hold the can and open it with the opener tool with her other hand, and so got me to do it. That period, actually, was about the only time she voluntarily spoke to me. “Thank you, dear,” she’d say, after the can was opened, and this great waft of dead fish and oil went up in the air. “Thanks for your help. I can do the rest.” And she used her only hand so knife out the fish onto the toast. And that would be it. I was excused.

I suppose she can’t have been a bad woman. Only, I was too young not to feel only fear for her.

There was a second stroke that killed her off a couple of months after that first one. It was ‘quick and painless’ the doctors told us.

Nobody ever talks about her in the family anymore. There seems no reason to bring her up.

Real dead bodies were used during the Kurtz compound scene at the end. Those bodies that you see hanging or slumped around the compound as the characters walk around – were real. They were taken from a local cemetery in the Philippines, where the film was shot.

Dennis Hopper deliberately wound up Marlon Brando off-set, to the point that Brando couldn’t stand being around him. The scene where Brando throws a book at him is a proper show of irritation.

Kurtz’ character in the book was supposed to be incredibly thin. Brando and the production team were conscious of his weight. Which is why many of his scenes are shot in the dark.

Martin Sheen couldn’t swim and was terrified that he might fall off the boat whenever scenes on it were being shot.

There are numerous scenes where Martin Sheen’s younger brother appears on the film. Because Martin suffered a heart attack whilst the film was being made and wasn’t able to do shooting. The brother that we see of him are when his back is turned to the camera.

Laurence Fishburne was only 14 years old when he was cast for the role, having lied about his age to get in. Although, the movie took so long to complete that he was 17 (as his character says in the film) when his scenes were finally filmed.

George Lucas was actually originally interested in making Apocalypse Now. He was given the initial script.

Because there were no film laboratories in the Philippines, the camera content basically had to be shot ‘blind’, and then shipped back to America where the team could process it.

And they shot so much material that there were ‘miles’, literally, of footage that they had to edit through and work at.