Dom's Rambles

Author’s note: The following is another of my extended and unashamedly cathartic screeds which runs to close on 15,000 words in total and for added value contains not one, but two of the most venomous, unrestrained and thoroughly satisfying rants I’ve ever composed.
For the sake of the blog I’ve decided to present it over four separate posts, the reason being that it would take longer than most of my reader’s lunch breaks – and, I dare say, attention spans – to tackle in one go (I assume you’re on your lunch breaks, my stats show a definite spike in the number of visitors between noon and two in the afternoon UK time).
Something else to be aware of is that the thing is written as an addendum to the main story and as such occasionally references events that haven’t occurred in the uploaded chapters as yet.
The first of the four parts, i.e. the one below, tells how, in 1990, I fathered – and promptly abandoned - a son. Until recently I had assumed that this was common knowledge amongst the old Vaults crowd. It wasn’t, as I discovered when I was effervescing about having found him, and this was one of the reasons I decided to write it up.
The second episode concerns my last relationship (if that term can be applied to an arrangement which basically involved me emptying my plums into a miserable, self-pitying and emotionally disturbed lump of brainless meat every other evening) and how the fallout from it helped stiffen my resolve to track my son down and face whatever music there was to be faced for my shameful neglect of him.
The third thrilling instalment relates how, using a combination of intuition, lateral thinking and my finely honed internet stalking skills, I located him.
Last, but by no means least, we have an account of what happened the first time we went down the pub together and collided with someone I was fated to collide with sooner or later and who was, for some bizarre reason, sporting an absolutely ridiculous comedy hairdo which fell part way between a Miami Vice villain’s mullet and a Louis ‘Welcome To Jazz Club’ Balfour pudding bowl.
Before he kicked off, this hilariously coiffured oaf did me the courtesy (albeit unwittingly - but then he's not very bright) of revealing that, in certain key areas, the online Down & Out… pieces are having exactly the desired effect.

I find it a constant source of both amusement and incredulity that anyone, let alone someone who had been as well briefed about me as he clearly had, could be such a total and utter fucking moron as to have betrayed that so clumsily.
I bet his girlfriend (sorry, I mean partner) was furious when he got home.
Not that she would have dared voice her displeasure of course.
Well, not unless she’d wanted a black eye and a thick lip.

There was one series of events running parallel to those of our little tale which, after much deliberation and a good deal of anxious hand-wringing, I decided not to include. There were good reasons for this, chief among them being that the guilt and shame weighed so heavily on me that I doubt I could have written about it - and certainly not in the same flippant tone I used everywhere else. Neither did I have the slightest desire to cause the people involved any more embarrassment, upheaval or discomfiture than I already had done.
There were structural and narrative considerations too. The whole Down & Out in Sheffield & Lincoln project was undertaken for a specific purpose and as such already had its central theme. To have introduced another major story line would have complicated things a little too much and detracted attention from those areas I particularly wanted to illuminate.
However, in the light of recent events I’ve reappraised this and have decided to reveal all by appending the following account to the main story.
In the late summer and early autumn of 1989, round about the same time as Down & Out… gets going, and throughout the period when Sally and my relationship was on and off with the frequency of a strobe light, I had a number of other females on the go as well. One of them was an almost eighteen year old we’ll call Lydia who used to hang around in the Vaults with a group of similarly aged friends.
In the early part of November Lydia told me she had skipped a period and thought she might be pregnant. Of course I immediately dismissed this as some desperate juvenile ruse intended to get me to pay more attention to her and I thought no more of it (that kind of thing was a common tactic of Vaults girlies and such ‘pregnancies’ always seemed to conclude with a melodramatic - and conveniently timed - miscarriage in Lazers toilets on a Saturday night).
However, as Lydia’s rapidly increasing size made clear, she wasn’t faking it. Once this realisation hit home it scared me absolutely shitless and whenever she tried to raise the issue I would shut my eyes, clap my hands over my ears and refuse to accept what was happening. Although she was more than civil at first, my attitude did get Lydia rather frustrated and with her pleas and exhortations falling on such resolutely deaf ears she decided a more vicarious approach was called for.
Shortly before Christmas, when I was in Vienna’s nightclub with Sally, Lydia had followed her into the toilets and knocked her to the floor before delivering all kinds of blood-curdling threats as to what she intended to do if I didn’t start taking things a little more seriously¹.
Sally didn’t tell me about this until we were back at my place whereupon I went absolutely, stark raving crackers. The next time I saw Lydia I informed her – and in no uncertain terms - that by hurting and threatening Sally she had just screwed up any chance of me being remotely sympathetic towards her.
This provided me with exactly the kind of excuse that I needed to wriggle out of my responsibilities.
As we saw in the main story, in early January of 1990 I made my move to Sheffield, a couple of days later Sally found out about my dalliance with Jo and we broke up. Although I wasn’t exactly happy about this, the physical distance between us, plus the fact that I was having such a blast with all my groovy new Sheffield friends, allowed me to forget about it most of the time and I certainly wasn’t in any hurry to visit Lincoln to be reminded. I was in even less of one when Stu entered the equation. Losing Sally was one thing but to see her draped all over the only person of my acquaintance who I have ever truly hated and wished dead (ideally following a protracted case of bowel cancer and with the added complication of a lethal allergy to all known analgesics) was something else entirely. Let’s just say that it bothered me a hell of a lot more than I was ever prepared to admit.
But I digress.
I had another reason for staying away from Lincoln as doing so allowed me to avoid Lydia.
C… was born on 9th of June 1990 and shortly afterwards I had visited Lincoln one Saturday afternoon to deliver a guitar (which was too hot to sell in Sheffield) to the bassist in Twiggy’s band. Once the deal was done the intention was to head straight back to Sheffield but as there was such a good crowd in the Vaults, including several people I hadn’t seen for ages, I decided to make a night of it in Lincoln.
When Lazers kicked out in the early hours of Sunday morning I wound up going home with Lydia. I’m not entirely sure how this came about but I think a part of me was burning with curiosity and a part of her was hoping that if I saw and held C… that it might shake loose some latent decency.
The next morning the consequences of my actions were brought into the bedroom and the tiny bundle was plonked into my arms. I was still very much in denial at this point and as C… was only a few weeks old, was fast asleep and not really doing much I was just about able to maintain my detachment - even if I was feeling distinctly uncomfortable doing so. As soon as I could I made my excuses and rushed off to catch the first train back to Sheffield.
It was about this time that my housing situation entered crisis territory and I moved into Mötley Süe’s flat in Conisbrough. I would stay there, to all intents and purposes incommunicado, for most of the next three months, right up until my return to Lincoln in late September.
Within days of my homecoming I wound up going home with Lydia again. This time C… woke up in the middle of the night and while we were trying to stop him crying I picked him up and bounced him playfully up and down on my knee at which point he looked directly into my eyes, smiled one of those adorable baby smiles that can melt even the stoniest of hearts and let out a gurgling little laugh.
The wave of emotion that washed over me was absolutely terrifying - to this day I haven’t experienced anything remotely like it. In that moment I realised that I wanted to be there for him, I wanted to be involved, I wanted to see him take his first steps and hear him speak his first words and to be around to see him grow up. But I knew it would mean straightening out, getting a job and the end of my indolent and happy go lucky lifestyle.
I also knew that I was too much of a selfish and irresponsible coward to go through with it.
I know it’s no excuse, but back then I was incapable of seeing beyond the next giro fuelled piss up; I wasn’t fit to be charged with the care and upkeep of a potted cactus, let alone a child.
So once again, I tried to escape an awkward reality by burying my head in the sand. Of course Lydia, who was left, quite literally, holding the baby, didn’t have that option and in sheer exasperation had called my parents to tell them about C… and to get them to put some pressure on me.
This was a seriously bad move on Lydia’s part. Granted, she probably assumed my family was normal - and she definitely had no idea of the screwed up and dysfunctional relationship I enjoyed with my parents – but all she succeeded in achieving was to distance me even further.
I discovered what Lydia had done when I arrived at my family home the following Sunday and when my old dear answered the door, car keys in hand, demanding to know where Lydia lived and all but drooling with excitement. Not because she’d just discovered that her first grandchild had arrived on the scene, but because she had such a marvellous new stick to beat me with.
I simply was not going to allow her that pleasure - nor was I going to let her within a mile of C…. I may have been too feckless to have taken onboard my share of his care and upbringing but I certainly wasn’t going to see any harm come to him. I knew he was going to have a tough enough time of it anyway and I wasn’t going to make it tougher by allowing that twisted, vindictive old witch to fill his head with the same nonsensical lies, the same poisonous snobbery and the same delusional worldview she had spent my formative years and beyond stuffing me full of.
So I denied everything and insisted that Lydia was just some silly girl who was infatuated with me and had got herself pregnant somewhere along the line and was trying to get to me by pretending I was the father of her child. That I succeeded in this was no mean feat considering that I’m probably – and with only one exception I can think of - the most hopelessly unconvincing liar on the planet.
Suffice it to say that when I next bumped into Lydia we had a screaming row and wouldn’t speak again until September of 2007. From that point on whenever Lydia and I were in the Vaults or Lazers at the same time we just made a point of blanking each other.
One afternoon in the spring of 1993 I’d come walking into the pub as Lydia was walking out and C… had come toddling past me. I had to admit that yes, it was true what everybody said, he did look like me - exactly like me; so much so that it would have been way beyond absurd to try denying that I was his father – which was something I had resorted to in a particularly pathetic attempt to assuage my guilt.
In the autumn of that same year I re-enrolled on the access course I dropped out of in early 1992 and in September of 1994 I moved to Sheffield for the third and (so far) final time - and to go to university rather than to get blowjobs off drunken rock chicks.
Having relocated to Sheffield, and over the course of the next decade, I visited Lincoln only occasionally and even then steered well clear of the Vaults (for reasons we don’t need to concern ourselves with here, I‘d fallen out with, or become estranged from, most of the people who still drank there). By the time I made my homecoming in early 2004 the place had been closed for two years and its former clientele, including Lydia, had mostly dropped out of sight.
I had made tentative inquiries as to Lydia’s whereabouts almost as soon as I moved back but no one had seen or heard a trace of her for years. Moreover, the only two people who were still on the scene and had been friendly with her were both barking mental (one of them always had been, the other had achieved it through LSD) and were about as much use as tits on a fish. Considerably less so in fact as I was led to believe that Lydia’s surname – which I had never known – was something other than it actually was. This had me charging off on countless online wild goose chases and totally hamstrung my efforts to track Lydia down via the internet. Consequently my search simmered on a back boiler for the next couple of years. Even so, I made a point of asking after her whenever I bumped into people from back in the day and I kept my ear to the ground in other ways too, such as rotating the days I did my shopping and the supermarkets I used on the off chance that I might bump into her (ironically enough Lydia was about the only one of my Eighties women that I didn’t bump into).
There were a number of things, roughly spread out between early 2004 and the summer of 2007, that steeled my determination to find Lydia (and hence C…). Even as far back as 1990 I knew that the guilt would get to me eventually, but although the guilt was like an albatross around my neck, it wasn’t my basic motivation - and neither was I looking for some kind of tawdry absolution. I like to think it came from a better place than that.
But there was one thing, much more than any other, that really did put my arse into gear.
Indulge me for a moment while we backtrack to gain a little context.
The physical wounds which resulted from the concluding events of Down & Out… healed in a matter of weeks. The psychological ones took considerably longer, especially the near total destruction of my self-confidence with women. By the time this had been restored I was in my late thirties and even then it soon became depressingly apparent that the only single females of a compatible age were either neurotically embittered divorcées or insane vegetarians with more than one cat².
As my fifth decade loomed I had more or less resigned myself to never meeting a woman I’d have children with so when, in the summer of 2006,the girl I was fucking fell pregnant, I was punching the air and turning cartwheels of delight.

To be continued...

¹Lydia claimed not to be able to remember this incident when I reminded her of it recently – even if she did go bright red and broke off eye contact with me.
²Or they were fanatical lefties. In November of 2001 a well meaning friend had set me up on a date with his girlfriend's sister who was, as I discovered half way through the evening, a card carrying member of the Socialist Worker Party (Alexie Sayle once described this lot as living in the place where people from Cloud Cuckoo Land go when they want to get away from it all). Believe me, the feathers flew that night, especially as the Yanks had just gone into Afghanistan.

posted by Dom  # 10:50 PM