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y new home was a flat above an electrical appliance store in a row of shops near the Northern General Hospital and in a part of Sheffield called Firvale. This was a predominantly Asian area and the flat was above the only shop in the whole row of about twenty or so others that was owned and run by white people.

The complexion, accent and attire of our neighbours (who, for some reason, all seemed to drive clapped out Nissan Bluebirds) offend Tony’s völkisch sensibilities somewhat and he was constantly bleating on about it. Of course for liberal minded Dom, who prided himself on his easy going, caring sharing, live and let live attitude it wasn’t really an issue.

It did, however, come as an eye opener to see the extent to which some areas in Sheffield had been colonised (and that’s exactly the right word to use) by people from the Indian subcontinent, especially when you’ve lived in an anaemic backwater like Lincoln all your life.

Lincoln was hardly the most cosmopolitan of places and you didn’t really see too many dark faces. At my school, which was a medium sized comprehensive, we only had one black kid (so you can probably imagine what kind of a time he had of it) and one Indian girl who was in my year and who I don’t think I ever heard speak. Of the few black and Asian people who did live in Lincoln when I was growing up I’d say that the overwhelming majority were health care professionals who worked as GPs or at the local hospitals. Either that or they ran take aways - and you could count those on the fingers of one hand.

The only ethnic groups in Lincolnshire to speak of were East Europeans, predominantly Poles but with a few Czechs, Lithuanians and Ukrainians thrown in the mix.¹

These were the children and families of ex-servicemen who, during WW2, had escaped the German occupation of their homelands to continue the fight with the British. After the war they had stayed here because, instead of welcoming these men home as heroes and staging parades in their honour (as any remotely sane political system would have done) the fucking bastard communists who had taken over their countries had slung them in jail, considering them dangerously tainted by western decadence.

But I’ll resist the urge to go into a full-blown rant.

The major gripe with my new address was the location. Being almost four miles outside the city centre meant that a casual afternoon stroll into town and back was no longer the option it had been when I was living in Crookes. It took an hour and a quarter to walk that distance and when you’ve planned your budget – quite literally - down to the last penny it didn’t do to be throwing money away on frivolous bus journeys.

Walking home after a night out could, as well as being a major drag, be a dangerous affair as you had to skirt the bandit country of Burngreave and Pitsmoor, which were two seriously iffy neighbourhoods. And before you even got that far there was the gauntlet of Spital Hill to be run.

Spital Hill was just outside the city centre, stretching for about two hundred yards up behind the Wicker Arches and was lined with fast food joints outside of which gangs of dangerous looking black youths would loiter until the small hours. There was also an illegal drinking club at the top of the hill which, if the rumours were to be believed, the police daren’t do anything about. Shootings were nothing out of the ordinary on this patch and if your face didn’t fit it really wasn’t a good idea to draw too much attention to yourself.

In my wide eyed naiveté I assumed I’d been given a wildly exaggerated version of the truth and shrugged it off. In 1990 I still maintained the kind of mindset that placed responsibility for all social ills firmly on Thatcher (I’m sure we all remember how she used to stalk the nation’s council estates artificially inseminating twelve year old girls, mugging pensioners, dealing heroine, ram-raiding off licenses, joyriding stolen GTi hatchbacks and shitting in phone boxes) and believed that the kind of thuggish behaviour prevalent in the inner cities was a direct result of the oppression and deprivation she was responsible for. Being oppressed and deprived myself - or so I liked to believe - meant that I was on the same side as these angry young black men and consequently had nothing to fear from them. The kids were, after all, united. Unfortunately these particular kids didn’t seem to have read quite as many sociology textbooks as I had and weren’t aware of our revolutionary solidarity, something I discovered the first night I actually did walk up Spital Hill.

As I nervously wound my way along the pavement, circumnavigating the various groups as I encountered them, one guy stepped in my path and waved a plastic bag with about a fivers worth of blow in it at me.

“Wanna buy some draw mate? £20 to you.”

I told him I didn’t and another stepped out to ask,

“Can you change a £20 note mate?”

Realising that they were trying to discover whether or not I was worth mugging I immediately sobered up.

“If I had that kind of money I’d be able to afford a taxi home,” I told him, acutely aware that I was now completely surrounded.

After being given a few cautionary bear-stares I was allowed to proceed unmolested.

You learned to deal with this kind of situation very quickly and it was more a matter of attitude than anything else. If you appeared anxious as you walked past they’d pick up on it and you were toast.

If you swaggered past arrogantly they’d take it as a challenge and you were also toast. What you had to do was display a tempered nonchalance, that way you wouldn’t attract their attention and, psychologically at least, they were much less likely to notice you and would assume you must be a local. Once acquired this was a skill that served me well in plenty of other iffy districts.

Where the flat was actually located was rather more sedate. It was a scruffy and ill-maintained area definitely, but I never felt intimidated or worried about being murdered in my bed (at least not by an intruder) or feared to walk the streets at night. I had things put into perspective when I bumped into a guy called Sam, who was an ex-girlfriend’s younger brother, on the train over to Lincoln one day. Sam was in his first year as a dentistry student at The University of Manchester and was living on Moss Side. I asked him what that was like.

“The first time you get mugged it’s absolutely terrifying,” he told me, “But by the third or fourth time you’ve got used to it and it just becomes a bit of a nuisance.”

Maybe my neighbourhood wasn’t so bad after all.

As for any specifically racial conflict - as opposed to conflict with people who, to lapse into PC terminology for a moment, ‘just happened to be’ black/Asian I only ever encountered it once. Even then it was the result of a misunderstanding rather than malice and involved a guy called Josh from Newcastle. I don’t recall how we came to know Josh, he just seemed to be there one day and was one of the most out of control and irresponsible people I’ve ever met. His speciality was pulling women and then making off with a selection of their most easily liquefiable assets the next morning which he would trade in at various second-hand shops to finance the following evening’s boozing. I remember he was supposed to be moving to Sheffield and had stayed over at the flat a few times when he’d been house-hunting.

The incident in question occurred one night when Josh had necked a hit of viciously potent LSD and had totally freaked out on it. A load of us left Rebels early in order to chaperone him to Danny’s place where the idea was to tie him up in the basement until he came down. We jumped in a black cab and almost immediately Josh had whimpered (I can’t do the accent I’m afraid),

“Lads, lads, I think I just shit myself!”

The gut churning reek that filled the back of the cab suggested his suspicions were right. The stench was so vile that we pulled the windows down as fast as we could and all rushed to shove our olfactory equipment as far out as it was possible to get. Our driver - who was Asian, as the vast majority of black cab drivers were – must have assumed we were trying to do a runner and had started yelling at us and demanding to know what we were playing at. Danny tried to tell him,

“It stinks of shit in here mate”.

He slammed the brakes on and ordered us ‘racist bastards’ to get out of the cab. We did try to explain things but by this time our inconsolably irate driver was on his radio calling for back up and we thought it would be a good idea to run away very quickly before every Asian cabbie in Sheffield arrived to dance a jihad on our heads.

One handy aspect of the flat was that it was within spitting distance of a 24 hour filling station. As was par for the course with these things the night shift consisted of a series of profoundly deaf, club-footed mental defectives who sat behind an armoured serving hatch fitted with soundproof glass and on the far side of the shop from where the cigarettes, confectionary, soft drinks, condoms and anything else anybody might reasonably want late at night were located. When you ran out of fags at some ungodly hour and went out to get ten Bensons it would take anything up to five minutes of shouting, lip reading and improvised sign language before the cretin on the other side of the hatch figured out what you wanted and another five for him to shuffle off and collect it.

The weekend I moved into the flat and the following Roxy Monday was one of the most intense ever; I was loaded for a start, both financially and, as a direct result, chemically so it was always going to be a good one. It seemed like absolutely everyone was out and Rebels, the Roxy and the pubs were all heaving. I took a camera with me and shot a full 36 exposure roll, getting some absolutely definitive pictures of the Sheffield rock scene. Unfortunately I don’t know what became of them. A girl I got talking to at the Roxy had mentioned that she worked some place where employees could get films developed for free and I gave her the roll. I never saw her – or it - again.

If she ever gets to read this, and still has that film somewhere, contact me and I will make it more than worth your while to forward it to me.

A large part of what made the weekend in question so memorable was that I finally got to sleep with Zoë. I’d come close on a few occasions already as Zoë and her boyfriend’s relationship was in terminal decline, but she had always had a last minute attack of guilt due to the fact that she was still technically seeing someone. The second I heard that it was officially all over I made my move. After Rebels that Friday night we ended up going back to her place and walked home with a girl called Marie who lived nearby. Zoë invited Marie in for a coffee and we sat in the living room chatting. Especially Marie, who talked and talked and talked. Then she took a deep breath and talked and talked and talked again. She would not shut up, neither would she take any of the series of heavily dropped hints that we wanted her to piss off so we could get down and dirty.

By the time Marie actually left it was almost fully light and Zoë and I couldn’t keep our eyes open. We crawled into bed and managed a fumbled bonk before falling into an exhausted sleep.

I know Marie will be one of the first people to read this (I even allowed her to choose her own pseudonym as a special treat) so I’m going to address her personally.

Thank you Marie, thank you so fucking much. Thank you for ensuring that what I was intending to be a night of sexual pyrotechnics with the girl I fancied more than any other turned out to be nothing but a damp squib.

Zoë was a bit off with me following this and I assumed it was because she was regretting allowing sex to sully a friendship. I was wrong as I found out later; she was terrified of Sue finding out and coming after her. By the time I was aware of this Zoë was seeing some other guy and I could have kicked myself for allowing her to get away.

So how was life with Tony?

Tony was certainly an interesting and memorable character - even if he wasn’t a particularly likeable or sympathetic one. There were issues right from the start.

I was an untidy slob by anybody’s standards; even today I still subscribe to P J O’Rourke’s dictum that you only need to clean your apartment once a girlfriend (after that you don’t need to bother as they’ll be keen to get to know the real you) but Tony was something else. I’d been a regular visitor to the flat in the months before I’d moved in and Tony had always kept the place presentable but afterwards he stopped doing any kind of domestic chore whatsoever.

This was amusing for a while in a real life version of The Young Ones kind of way. For example, we were such scrubbers that when the cooking  oil² in the chip pan needed changing –

and by the time we got around to it the stuff was generally black with bits of carbonised potato and would produced clouds of acrid fumes – we’d just pour it straight out the kitchen window where it would congeal on the outhouse roof. Sure enough, there came the day (or rather the night) when I’d locked myself out and had to drunkenly attempt to gain access through the kitchen window. I completely forgot about the lake of rancid cooking oil and when I climbed on top of the outhouse I went skidding arse over tit almost breaking my neck and covering myself in stinking black slime which took two baths and half a bottle of washing up liquid to remove. However, the novelty wore off very quickly.

Every now and again Tony would apologise for neglecting his household duties and assure me that he would get around to doing his share, but he never did and eventually I got fed up of doing it for him. Consequently the flat got scruffier and scruffier. One day, when I’d come home after spending some time at Sue’s place, I discovered a bag of pork belly slices on the worktop which Tony had left there for so long that they were crawling with maggots.

Another annoyance was Tony’s tiresome - and totally deluded - conviction that he was some kind of wheeling dealing Del Trotter character; he was constantly coming home with junk that he thought he could sell and make a profit on. The overwhelming majority of the time he didn’t. His foray into the porn industry, for example, was never going to shortlist him for the 1990 Young Businessman of the Year award or cause Larry Flynt any sleepless nights. Tony had several bin bags full of wank mags in his bedroom (I seem to recall that he’d intercepted them on their way to being pulped) and was adamant he could make a fortune peddling them to students. Most of these magazines were heavily censored with strategically placed stars printed over the top of the action, something that didn’t exactly enhance their sales appeal. As well as the magazines Tony had a mountain of pornographic videos which he tried to rent out to people in the pub. These were similarly seconded goods in that they were around tenth generation copies and of such poor quality that they were barely viewable.

Then he decided to branch out into the motor trade. When Tony discovered I could drive he started getting all excited about some knackered old Morris Ital he could get me for ‘only £250’. I tried to explain to him that I was on the dole, there was no way I could afford £250 to buy a car - let alone be able to tax, insure and run it. The thing didn’t even have an MOT certificate and when I pointed out that a car without an MOT was only worth scrap value Tony smiled and, in the kind of gentle, reassuring tone with which you might address an amiable but retarded child, told me,

“Dom, I started out selling cars. I know what I’m talking about.”

Get that, he started out selling cars. Presumably he was trying to impress upon me that he’d built up his vast business empire from such humble beginnings.

Of the lesser niggles about living with Tony by far the most trying was being rudely awoken every morning by him playing his bass along to the intro section of Sweet Child O’ Mine by Guns ‘n’ Roses. I’d be startled out of my sleep by the THUNK! of him turning his amp on and then it would start pounding through the ceiling and rattling the window panes, non-stop, for the next hour.

Tony had been in a punk pathétique (as the sub-genre was known) band called The Chartham Method who had split up the previous year. The band had been quite popular locally and had their crowning glory in supporting the Macc Lads at the Retford Porterhouse. They had also played several support slots for the Lurkers, the Vibrators, 999, the UK Subs and various others of that little stable of punk bands who were still doing the circuit and milking the last drops from their 15 minutes of 1970s fame.

Tony had never got over the band’s demise³ and would insist on playing me tapes of their shows and asking for my opinion. By the standards of the genre they were quite good. The singer was without a doubt the star of the show and was so engagingly witty that he was more like a stand up comedian than a musician. There was one track I particularly liked and which used the music from the UK Subs punk classic Warhead, but had lyrics about a local locksmiths shop. I thought this was a work of sublime comic genius. Where the original words had been,

Children in Africa with Tommy guns

They’re getting ready.

They had been changed to

Children in Attercliffe out with their mums

They’re getting keys cut.

Tony’s determination to put the band - or a version of it - back together again was absolutely dogged and he seemed to think I was going to play guitar for him, although the first I heard of this was when Mikki told me. When I informed Tony that I wasn’t interested he got a major lippy on - right up until he managed to persuade a mate of his called Paul to fill the position. Paul would come around the flat every other night and they’d disappear into Tony’s bedroom to make an infernal racket for hours on end. This was as far as the band ever got, even if they did come up with a good name in Joey & The Spanners, which I thought was quite amusing. It was obligatory for bands of the genus pathétique to have ridiculous names; the Fuck City Shitters, the Bus Station Loonies and Trolley Dog Shag all hailed from Sheffield so to think of something that stood out from the crowd could be quite a challenge.

As soon as they’d decided on the name Tony and Paul had set about designing and printing up stacks of flyers which they would distribute to the punters outside the Wap and Yorkshireman. It was only after scrutinising these things in minute detail that you realised that the only information they contained was that there was a band called Joey & The Spanners and Tony and Paul were in it. It wasn’t like they were advertising upcoming gigs or plugging a demo tape.

This was when I first began to suspect that Tony might not be playing with a full deck. He seemed to believe that if he pretended to everyone – himself included - that he had a working band on the go then it would somehow come true. It was only as I settled in that it began to dawn on me how much of a screaming loon he actually was.

Schizophrenia typically announces itself via episodes of increasingly bizarre behaviour and it was my misfortune to have moved in with Tony as he was on the cusp of a particularly acute and prolonged one. I know that you shouldn’t mock the afflicted and I’m not without sympathy for the plight of the mentally ill and would normally try to treat such people with as much compassion as yours truly is capable of. But regardless of any psychiatric issues, and behind the superficial jocularity he presented to the world at large, Tony was a fundamentally unpleasant person. He was also fully in control when he stole certain treasured possessions of mine and I’m going to make an exception to that rule.

I’m also going to take a great deal of pleasure in doing so.

The next thing that got me worrying about the fragility of Tony’s mental state was his unshakeable belief that the flat was being cased by persons unknown and was in imminent danger of being burgled. To this end he would spend hours at a time peering anxiously through a gap in the curtains trying to spot suspicious looking people.

The idea that anyone would burgle us – let alone would plan to burgle us – was totally and utterly preposterous. With the exception of our guitars there was nothing in the place that even the most desperate smack addict would be interested in stealing.

And it gets better.

For some reason Tony had got it into his head that the ‘fucking Pakis’ who ran the shop next door were using the flat above it to slaughter sheep in during the night. At first I couldn’t tell whether he was joking or not.

“Why would they do that?” I had cautiously asked him.

Tony must have heard something about the halal slaughter thing and got it completely wrapped around his neck.

“It’s to save money, their religion says they’re supposed to pay one of them Paki priests to do it with a special knife that’s been blessed by the Ayatollah.”

Right.

Tony chief concern was with the public health implications of the vast quantities of sheep’s blood our neighbours were apparently pouring into the city’s sewers. He was, he said, compiling a dossier of evidence which he intended to present to whoever it is you present that sort of thing to.

We would regularly dive head first through the looking glass on this one. Most of the time it involved Tony’s auditory hallucinations when he would imagine that he could hear our neighbours performing their dastardly deeds. We’d be watching TV or listening to some music when all of a sudden Tony’s ears would prick up and he’d sit bolt upright. Then he’d leap out of his armchair, sprint into the hallway and start pounding his fists on the adjoining wall and screaming the ugliest kind of racist abuse.

Once I’d come home in the early hours with a girl I’d picked up in Rebels to find Tony with his ear pressed against the wall and a look of painfully intense concentration on his face. He had put his forefinger to his lips, pointed at the section of wall his ear was pressed against and whispered,

“Alright Dom, alright love, they’ve stopped for now but they know I’m listening. I’ll be waiting for when they start up again. Fucking Paki bastards.”

Once we were safely in my bedroom my companion had nervously inquired as to what Tony was doing.

“Best not ask,” I told her.

Eventually I had to do it. Just to satisfy my curiosity and to reassure myself that it wasn’t me who was going mad I shinned up the drainpipe to take a look through next door’s window. The first floor flat was unoccupied and all it contained was racks of shelving; there wasn’t room to swing a cat let alone slaughter a sheep. And how did Tony imagine they got the things in and out of the place without being seen – through a fucking tunnel?

More worrying still was the story that unfolded around the mounted photograph Tony kept on top of the fireplace. The first time I’d been round to the flat I’d noticed this photo, which was a professional studio shot of a leather mini-skirted, mesh-stockinged – and very sexy - punk girl with an angelic little toddler sat on her lap.

“Who’s that?” I asked Tony,

“It’s Debbie, my ex missus, and my daughter Chloe,” He replied - and in such a way as to suggest he wasn’t willing to go into any more detail than that.

I didn’t pursue it.

A few weeks later I happened to see this girl and her daughter walking through town and mentioned so to Tony.

“Yeah, the fucking bitch is always doing that,” He’d growled.

“Always doing what?”

“Wandering around town with Chloe just so that my mates will see her and tell me about it and piss me off.”

I was then subjected to a half hour long, foam flecked diatribe about how Tony had treated Debbie like a princess only to have her break his heart and refuse him access to his daughter etc, etc.

Soon afterwards I found out that Nick had had a fling with this girl and I asked him if that was why there was so much bad blood between him and Tony.

Nick enlightened me.

“Tony never even went out with Debbie, he just used to follow her about and hang around outside her house. And Chloe isn’t his daughter. In the end Debbie had to get a court order to keep the fucking psycho away from her.”

It was at this point that I started to feel a little uneasy about living with Tony. There were plenty of other things that compounded the feeling.

Tony was obsessed with weaponry to a degree that was way beyond unhealthy. He had countless books on the subject and was constantly bringing air guns and crossbows home which he’d insist on taking to pieces and buggering up beyond repair. He once hacksawed the barrel off a fully functional .22 calibre air rifle - in spite of me trying to explain to him that shortening the barrel of a single projectile weapon was pointless as it’s not like you’re going to get a wider dispersion of the pellet. The only effect this modification had was to render the gun so woefully inaccurate that you were probably safest standing directly in front of it.

One evening I’d walked in to find a member of a notorious local bike gang sat in our front room complete with a selection of handguns spread out on the floor in front of him. It took a few very anxious seconds before I realised that they were just blank firing replicas. Tony ended up buying a Walther PPK knock-off and from that day on I don’t think he ever put it down. He would sit there, late at night, watching Tour of Duty and methodically pumping cartridges through the breech, refilling the magazine, slamming it back in the gun and repeating the process ad infinitum - all the time with a dreamy, faraway expression on his face.

Although I can’t claim to be any kind of authority on matters of mental health I have known plenty of certified schizophrenics in my time and I can tell the difference between eccentricity and insanity. It’s my experience that if you can tick two or more items on the following checklist then you can look Toto full in the eye and confidently assure him that you are nowhere near Kansas.

·         An obsessive preoccupation with all things pornographic (which might go some way towards explaining why they spend so much time wanking off).

·         Alternating delusions of grandeur and persecution.

·         The belief that here’s some vast conspiracy controlling everything.

·         A peculiar goatish/barnyard odour. According to some (including Hannibal Lecture), the smell of a schizophrenics’ sweat, which contains the pungent chemical trans-3 methyl-2 hexenoic acid, is their classic calling card.

·         Deeply held, but hopelessly confused, spiritual and religious convictions – and that includes secular religions such as environmentalism, so-called ‘peace’ activism and the more unhinged denominations of the church of Marxism.

Tony qualified on all counts except the latter. Then I came home one afternoon to discover him in the company of some pamphlet-laden weirdo from the Jesus Army.

If you’ve never heard of this lot let me give you a brief synopsis. The Jesus Army are a happy-clappy Christian organisation who travel around in customised double decker buses, setting up stall in town centres to preach their interpretation of the Gospel and attempting to recruit new members. They had about sixty or so intentional communities of varying sizes scattered about the country and one of the largest was in Sheffield, which meant that their distinctively garbed members were a common sight locally.

The first time I personally encountered the Jesus Army was in the Wap one Roxy night. Danny and I had been chatting up a couple of girls when I noticed one of the local drug dealers wandering around. I asked the girls if they fancied splitting the cost of a couple of wraps of speed.

“We don’t need drink or drugs to have a good time,” one of them told me, “We’re high on Jesus.”

I don’t have a problem with people’s religious convictions - leastways provided they don’t use them as a rationale for violence or to impose upon the freedoms of others - and I like to think I’m respectful enough to avoid sneering. That said, I am exceedingly wary of any organisation that combines religious dogma with a military structure and I do have a major problem with proselytes, especially those who target the non compos mentis. This was a favoured tactic of the Jesus Army who counted a plethora of former drug addicts, alcoholics, mental patients and other assorted oddballs amongst their number. People who had simply exchanged their chemical crutches for spiritual ones. Granted, their recruits were no longer committing robberies or begging in the subway, prostituting their bodies or engaging in other antisocial behaviour, which is to be applauded of course, but I always caught an unsettling hint of the lemming swarm – not to mention the goose-step - in the zeal with which these people embraced their new reason to live.

There’s an old Cheech & Chong sketch in which they talk about a former acquaintance who was all messed up on drugs until he got religion.

Now he’s all messed up on God.

As being in the same room as one of these creeps made my skin crawl I went to the kitchen to fix myself something to eat. I couldn’t resist wigging in on the conversation though and deliberately left the door open. From what I could hear it was quite obvious that Tony didn’t have the slightest grasp of Christian principles nor was he taking in a word of what was being said to him. It was equally clear that the guy who was attempting to steer him down the path of righteousness could see this and understood perfectly well that he was dealing with someone who wasn’t quite the full shilling. As far as I’m concerned to take advantage of someone like that is beneath contempt and for sheer cynicism I can’t think of much to top it.

For the next couple of weeks Tony was absolutely insufferable, jabbering on and on about his new found faith and his special relationship with God and how He had chosen to work through him - although quite how, Tony never really went into details about which was probably just as well as I wouldn’t have been surprised had it involved the ritual murder of prostitutes (possibly using a special knife that had been blessed by the Ayatollah).

Tony’s mentor had left him a pocket Bible which he’d pore over for hours at a time committing enormous chunks to memory – even though he had no more understanding of what he was memorising than an illiterate medieval peasant had of a Latin Mass. I had to endure a constant stream of theatrically delivered Biblical quotations which Tony would often confuse with the lyrics of popular rock song. This could be hideously embarrassing in public - especially in the pub when he would go all glassy eyed before standing up to announce:

“And the angel of the Lord appeareth in a flame of fire out of the midst of the bush.

And the angel speaketh unto him: So let it be written, so let it be done.

To kill the first born pharaoh son I’m creeping death.”

An uncomfortable silence always followed these outbursts. As soon as people had resumed their conversations he’d come out with another.

“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, sayeth the Lord.

And like a bat out of hell I’ll be gone when the morning comes!”

People usually assumed that Tony was just clowning around but I knew he was being deadly serious and I’d often wonder what he was going to do for a finale.

Perform the miracle of the loaves and fishes?

Heal the sick perhaps?

Maybe he’d reveal that I’d deny him three times before last orders.

Then he’d do it again,

“And I looked, and behold, a pale horse: and his name that sat upon him was Death and Hell followed with him.

And smoke there was, smoke on the water, fire in the sky.”

One time, when I’d gone to the bar during a particularly lengthy oration, someone had asked me if I was Tony’s social worker.

But, thank God, it was a short lived phase and he was soon back to his old irreligious - although no less nutty - self.

Tony’s spiritual fervour may have abated but his condition was worsening in other departments. As the summer arrived his demented rants about the sheep slaughtering neighbours were becoming ever more frequent and severe. He was also beginning to launch into them regardless of whether or not he had an audience. I could hear him babbling away to himself in the middle of the night and I kept having this recurring nightmare in which I woke to find Tony standing naked at the end of my bed brandishing a meat cleaver and a hard-on. I’m being entirely serious when I say that his behaviour was beginning to frighten me – and frighten me to the extent that I made a habit of sleeping with a knife under my pillow.

Then, and as if I didn’t have enough to fret about already, my haemorrhoids went critical. I've no idea what I did – or neglected to do – to allow the things to develop, although given that I’d started to notice the symptoms when I was staying at Barry’s place and that they had calmed down in Crookes only to flare up again and get progressively worse alongside the realisation that I’d moved in with an emotionally unstable lunatic, I imagine it was probably something to do with stress.

And believe me you really cannot appreciate what the bastards are like until you’ve had them. The constant throbbing and maddening itching is bad enough but pencil pains are something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Pencil pains, for the benefit of the uninitiated, are agonising twinges that feel as if someone has brutally jabbed the sharp end of a pencil up your rear. And they arrive with absolutely no warning. People soon learned to recognise when I got these; we’d be walking along chatting when all of a sudden I’d be on tip-toes, taking a hissing intake of breath and with a seriously vexed expression on my face.

“Pencil pains?”

“Too fucking right!”

Of course I’d heard of piles, I knew that they grew out of your bum – which rendered them instantly hilarious - but I didn’t know they were distended blood vessels and needed to be treated properly. I thought they were like boils or blisters and could be got rid of by bursting them. Also, given their location, I was way too embarrassed to seek medical attention – I couldn’t even summon up the necessary pluck to buy a tube of Preparation H from the local pharmacy - so I elected to keep my dignity and suffer in silence.

The day eventually came when the itching was close to unbearable and the pencil pains were arriving with such machine-gun rapidity that I couldn't sit down. A little the worse for drink by this point I decided that drastic measures were called for. Squatting half naked over a mirror and armed with a pair of nail clippers - which I‘d cack-handedly sterilised in the kettle - I attempted DIY surgery. I grabbed hold of the largest of my farmers, pulled it out as far as I could stand before positioning the clippers around it and bracing myself.

I remember hearing a sickening, gristly crunch but after that the written word is a wholly insufficient medium through which to describe the searing agony. Let’s just say that I’d swear my howls set off car alarms streets away. There was blood everywhere, all down the back of my legs, on my hands, splattered all over the mirror and carpet. All I could think to do was to leap into the bathtub, turn the cold tap on full and shove my behind in the flow of water. I kept this up for a good 15 minutes – even then it didn’t stop the bleeding completely and I had to wedge an enormous wad of toilet roll in my underpants for days afterwards. The only thing that prevented me from hot-footing it over the road to the Northern General Hospital was that I knew Olivia (the brassy goth girl we met in the last chapter) regularly worked the A&E department. Were she on that night then the story would have been all over Sheffield within days and I didn’t think the world was quite ready for it just yet!

In early July karma decided that I’d suffered enough and smiled on me by offering a month long respite from Tony when he had gone to do some cash in hand work on a farm in Holbeach. I was also offered a way out of my housing dilemma. The lease on Bob and Nick’s flat was due to expire in August and they had just found a four bedroom house up for rent in Nether Edge. They had got another lad, called Justin, interested in sharing the place and were wondering whether I might like to come in with them as the fourth party.

I was so pleased I could have happily planted soppy wet kisses on all of their bottoms.

The place was owned by a Pakistani family who were moving to a new home in Leicester and had decided to rent their old one out rather than sell it. A few days later we went to check it out and what a des-res it turned out to be. To my surprise our potential landlords were totally cool with us all being on benefit and assured us that if we were serious about taking the place then it was ours. Unfortunately we couldn’t move in straight away as there was some complex chain involved with the family’s move to Leicester and only when that had been sorted out would we get the green light.

Still, we’d been as good as promised the place and I started thinking about how I was going to break the news to Tony. I knew he wouldn’t take kindly to me sharing a place with Nick – from Tony’s warped perspective he’d doubtless see it as some kind of betrayal. In the end I didn’t bother and took the cowards way out. When Tony was offered another months work in Holbeach I sneakily moved my stuff into Sue’s flat in Conisbrough while we waited for the house to become available.

In the meantime I went to the Sheffield dole office and signed on as no fixed abode which meant I got my giro issued over the counter. It also sidestepped the hassle of using Sue’s address, which was outside the Sheffield area and would have meant re-registering my claim at the Doncaster office and all the pain in the arse form filling and fucking about that entailed.

Then disaster struck when the family who owned the house decided to stay put. According to what Nick had been told, someone further up the chain had reneged on a deal which had screwed everything up for everyone else – especially us.

Things were complicated further when Tony came home unexpectedly, discovered I’d moved out and went absolutely stark raving berserk. I heard that he was threatening to kill me and prowling the pubs day and night trying to find out where I was staying and generally realising all my worst fears about his deteriorating mental state. I was wary of venturing into Sheffield from that point on as I didn’t exactly relish the prospect of coming to blows with Odd Bod Junior’s psychotic twin.

I was now effectively stranded in Conisbrough.

At first this wasn’t too bad and it had its compensations – there was the non stop sex for a start. It would be nice to be able to say that Sue and I spent the next few weeks systematically breaking down the taboos with which society enshrouds and represses sexual expression but we didn’t, we just fucked endlessly.
Sue was hardly the most engaging partner in any other department though, and after a while I started to get a little stir crazy; most of all I missed the nights out and hanging around with Danny and Mikki and the gang. The only nightlife I managed to sample during my time at Sue’s was when she and I had gone to some mediocre midweek rock do at a pub in Doncaster. The highlight of the evening was bumping into a girl called Lisa who was a friend of Suicidal Sarah, the attention-seeking sixteen year old we met in chapter four - the one who told everyone in Sheffield she was called ‘Sass’ (unlike her dizzy friend, Lisa was never so manifestly insecure as to feel the need to invent some silly nickname for herself). Lisa had told me to lose Sue and come home with her that night as her parents were away and she had the house to herself. Unfortunately, I was flirting so brazenly that Sue figured out what was going on and came striding over to head-butt me in the face with such force that it put me on my knees and opened up a huge gash over my right eye (I still carry a scar from this and even the slightest knock will open it up again).
Like many people trapped in a domestic situation that provides zero intellectual stimulation I compensated for it by reading avidly. Whenever I went into Sheffield to sign on I’d call in at the library and pick up enough reading material to see me through the next fortnight - in fact left to my own devices I’d have spent all my waking hours with my head in a book. This used to annoy Sue as she considered it ‘snobby’.
As the summer progressed I became ever more complacent about trying to find another place to live; I procrastinate at the best of times and lacking the kind of motivation that comes from sleeping under the kitchen table in a hippie’s bed-sit - or on the street - I kept finding excuses to avoid it. Practically all that kept me going was the prospect of the imminent annual pilgrimage to Castle Donnington for the Monsters of Rock festival.

No one from my crowd in Sheffield had gone to the festival that year so as soon as I arrived I set off looking for the Lincoln contingent. They weren’t too hard to find and were standing in exactly the same place they’d stood every year since 1981. ⁴