Chapter 10: The End of the Affair

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n Wednesday 8^th April 1992 I arrived in Sheffield with a fortnight’s dole money and all my worldly possessions which, with the exception of my guitar and the clothes I stood up in, could just about fit in two medium sized rucksacks.

All said and done 1992 wasn’t exactly a vintage year and in the aftermath of the events of the preceding Christmas I hit a bit of a trough. I couldn’t be bothered to work for my old man, which meant I was broke all the time. I wound up skipping so many college classes that halfway through February I’d stopped going altogether. I lost my appetite to the extent that I’d be faint with hunger before I got around to making anything to eat. Even keeping myself clean required such effort that I’d be retching at my own smell before I took a shower or washed my clothes.

On a good day I could just about summon up the energy to call on mental Ian down the street to borrow another couple of his vast collection of sci-fi anthologies and would lose myself in those until I nodded off. Sometimes, when I felt vigorous enough to raise (and sustain) a hard-on, I’d have Molly or Jenny come over for some half-hearted sex. On giro weekends I’d go to Rock City where I’d be happy in the haze of a drunken hour but the next day, heaven knows I’d be miserable then.

One morning I woke up under such a leaden blanket of apathy that I couldn’t get out of bed and stayed there for most of the next three days, pissing into empty beer cans, shutting out the world and retreating to a locked room somewhere deep inside my mind.

It was Danny, bless his cotton socks, who picked me up – even if it was only temporarily. In the first week of March he called me at my parents’ and asked - for the umpteenth time - if I wanted him to sort me out with one of the vacant rooms in his housing association cluster flat. Danny had been badgering me to move back to Sheffield ever since we’d re-established contact a year before and now that I had nothing to keep me in Lincoln I told him to go for it. Within a couple of weeks I had my room.

Although I wasn’t prepared to admit so at the time, the principal reason I moved was the expectation of a repeat performance of 1990 when I was able to physically distance myself from my personal troubles and then forget about them in a whirlwind of wine, women and song. But it wasn’t to be, two years later things were different, very different.

For me it had all started on 21^st October 1980 when Dom, the sixteen year old punk rocker, had his damascene conversion to the Church of Metal after his eyes had seen the glory of AC/DC on the UK leg of their Back in Black tour. Twelve years later what had been such a dynamic and endlessly exciting youth culture and music scene had stagnated and would shortly go into a precipitous decline.

At a casual glance all seemed well during those opening months of 1992. The Wap and Yorkshireman were both lively, Rebels likewise and the Roxy still packed them in every other Monday, but the buzz had gone and there was a definite, albeit intangible, something in the air suggesting that it was all winding down. I always thought it was like arriving at a wild late night party sometime in the small hours when it was still rowdy but the booze was running out and people were beginning to drift away – especially the crowd I’d run with.

Danny had started a sign-writing course a few months previously and was obliged to get by on a maintenance grant which provided even less disposable income than the dole and meant that he could hardly ever afford to go out. To make ends meet financially he’d moved his (up until that point) on-off girlfriend Tina in with him and was, to all intents and purposes, living off her wages. At the weekend he would take a trip to the local Co Op to buy a case of foul tasting, piss-weak own-brand bitter and would drink that in front of the TV. Apart from a monthly trip to The Roxy when Tina got paid, that was pretty much the full extent of his partying.

Mikki split up with Claudia soon after I moved over and, after a brief on the rebound fling with a seventeen year old called Ellen, went all weird and withdrawn. On the rare occasions when he did venture out he would never come up to Rebels and went home as soon as the pubs closed; it wasn’t too long before he was refusing to go out in Sheffield at all.

Mikki had friends in Nottingham and would spend his giro weekends with them. One time I arranged to meet up with Mikki’s lot in Fagin’s before hitting Rock City’s Saturday alternative night which, by mid 1992, I much preferred to the clubs Friday metal bash.

He didn’t turn up and I was left sitting in the pub by myself all night.

After apologising profusely and assuring me it was a one-off that wouldn’t be repeated he did the same thing the next time we arranged a Nottingham night out. I told him that if it happened just once more then we’d have a serious problem.

A few weeks later, when we were supposed to be going to Rock City to see (the band) Rosetta Stone, Mikki stood me up again. Even though I bumped into a crowd from Lincoln and managed to salvage the night I decided there and then that he had pissed me about for the last time.

Of the other folks I’d known, Bob had moved to Manchester, Nick had gone to ground, ditto Liam and Jeff; Nancy and Suzy and the girls they hung around with had all got into the budding dance scene and spent their weekends at warehouse raves; even Mötley Süe was now heavily involved with some estate pikey and seemed to have calmed down - which came as a bitterly frustrating disappointment.

In June, when Danny finished college, he and Tina went to Malta for the next four months to stay with his parents who had bought a retirement villa over there. Socially, this screwed me right up and if I wanted to go out now I had to do so on my own. Two years previously that wouldn’t have been such a big deal but with my self-confidence shot to pieces - which would turn out to be the longest lasting psychological damage from the Great Head Fuck of Christmas 1991 - I no longer had the front to approach people and make a new set of friends.

And as for pulling women? Forget about it. In that whole year I put just three new notches on my bedpost. In 1990 it had been nothing unusual to manage that over the course of a Roxy weekend.

I soon got tired of wasting my time and money going out on my own – not to mention becoming increasingly self-conscious of looking like a complete saddo - and spent my evenings laying on my bed either listening to the radio or, when I could concentrate for longer than a couple of paragraphs at a time, reading, and steadily sinking into a state of near pathological inertia.

Apart from when I had to go sign on, I’d sleep until four or five in the afternoon and shortly after regaining consciousness would jump start my system by wanking off into one of yesterday’s socks and then drag myself out of bed to face what remained of the day. Once I’d got something to eat I’d flop back down, turn the radio on and stare at the ceiling, drifting away until sleep took me once again.

To all intents and purposes I was back to doing what I’d been doing in Lincoln – except that at least back there I was getting my dick sucked on a semi-regular basis. Indeed, by the time summer was on the wane I was having to admit that decamping to Sheffield had been a mistake on any number of levels and an unmitigated disaster where my sex life was concerned. But by this time my  bridges back to Lincoln were all burned, as I discovered when I went over to test the waters one weekend.

Molly was now engaged to some morbidly jealous half-wit who tried to start fights with me whenever I was in the pub; Jenny was involved with the latest of the endless procession of psychos, retards and wife-beaters she would gravitate towards, shack up with and get pregnant to over the next few years and Penny was officially seeing the guy I’d shared her affections with for the last few months I’d been in Lincoln.

Things rallied a little when Danny came back from Malta and once he got signed on the dole and sorted out with a shared house on a street off London Road then at least I had someone to go drinking with. By this time though, the scene really was on its arse and with bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden in the ascendancy the crowd was changing too. Each time we went out there were less and less of the old faces and more and more thrashers and neophyte grunge kids. Even if my self-confidence had remained intact I doubt it would have done much to improve my lamentable performance with the ladies because in this new environment old-skool sleaze rockers like Danny and I were no longer the apex sexual predators we once had been. Needless to say, that realisation hit home like a nail-studded demolition ball.

The last time I copped off with some anonymous rock chick was on Saturday 5^th December 1992. I woke up the next morning, my head spinning with a crippling hangover, ran my eyes over the moose lying next to me and wondered why I still felt the need to do stuff like this when I got absolutely nothing out of it.

I went for one of my head-straightening long walks that afternoon, wandering the length of the inner ring road to Meadowhall, then back into town via Firvale, past the flat I’d shared with Tony Wilkins, down Barnsley Road and through Burngreave. After traversing the city centre pedestrian precincts I made my way to the General Cemetery off Ecclesall Road, which was where I always went when I wanted to think stuff through, and sat on a bench for an hour or so, watching the world go by and gathering my thoughts as the sun set.

On the homeward stretch I detoured through Heeley to call in on Danny and discovered him sitting in the kitchen in the dark (his electricity meter had run out of credit that afternoon) with only the gas cooker to provide light and heat and sipping at a mug of gravy (a bag of Scoop & Save gravy granules being all he had left in his cupboard). I couldn’t help but start giggling at such a pathetically impoverished spectacle and for the second time that day wondered what the fuck I was doing.

After getting home an hour or so later and forcing down a bowl of reheated, three day old chilli (which was all I had left to eat) I turned the stereo on and collapsed on my bed.

I’d been in a bit of a prickly mood that weekend anyway as the coming Monday would mark a calendar year since Sally had set her near fatal charade in motion and I’d been brooding on it even more than I usually did. Even so, I was just about managing to keep a lid on everything when – and as if it had been cued up with me in mind – a certain seasonal ballad started playing on the radio.

Well, that was it, there was a lump in my throat before the vocal had even come in and by the time we got to, Me? I guess I was a shoulder to cry on I don’t think I’ve ever been in such a state.

Proof, if proof be needed, that the Fates have a viciously cruel sense of humour in seeing to it that the one song of sufficient poignancy to reduce the original heavy metal bad boy to a blubbering wreck would be Last Christmas by Wham.

And that wasn’t the end of it; as the music faded out the flood barriers gave way completely and everything else I’d been trying so hard not to think about came pouring through. Believe me, I spent the rest of that night clinging on by my fingertips.

But it didn’t kill me and when I woke up the next day somehow things didn’t seem so bad.

I’ve had a number of these episodes (as we’ll call them in order to circumnavigate the dreaded d-word) since that time, enough to have noticed that they tend to be triggered by a similar confluence of unbearably stressful, seemingly irresolvable, circumstances and progress through a series of recognisable phases. It’s also been my experience that when the necessary combination of shit happens, and you devolve into a sullen, immiserated recluse with the personal hygiene of a pissy tramp, a shorter temper than Sonny Corleone and all the get up and go of a narcoleptic tree sloth, it doesn’t happen overnight. For the first few weeks there’s a kind of washed out hollow feeling which intensifies as everything falls apart around you and the cloud cover builds. Once it has done and that horrible, soul-crushing darkness is in place then it can remain so for anything up to eighteen months – and during that time you might as well stay in bed all day because there’s fuck all else you’re capable of doing.

Eventually, some kind of crisis point is reached and shortly after that the mood lifts. You’ll be stumbling around in the gloom when, all of a sudden, a ray of light will break through - then another, then another and before you know it you can see clearly enough to be able to start functioning again.

The light that guided me back to functionality as 1992 drew to a close was provided by Penny Michaels when I bumped into her in the Vaults on Christmas Eve. Penny was, I discovered, newly single having just split up with Colin, the guy she’d been seeing for the past six months or so. Things had been pretty much over anyway, Penny told me, but the killing blow had been dealt when Colin called round on the way to the pub one night to discover her wearing a pair of dungarees. After totally doing his nut and demanding that Penny get changed into something more feminine he had made her hack the offending dungarees to pieces with a pair of dressmaking scissors lest she be tempted to wear them again and have anyone think she was a lesbian.

That was the hardest I’d laughed for well over a year. I laughed so much I could barely catch my breath and Penny’s bewilderment as to what I found so funny just made me laugh all the more.

I went to see Penny on Boxing Day evening and we ended up drinking wine and putting the world to rights until dawn. I called round a couple more times before I went back to Sheffield and from then on would find an excuse to come over to see her practically every giro weekend. In no time at all we were sleeping together and I started looking out for somewhere to live back in Lincoln. As luck would have it, some woman Penny knew was in need of a house-sitter while she worked in France for six months and on Thursday April 8^th 1993, exactly a year to the day after leaving Lincoln, I returned.

Although I was still on the dole I did have a game plan, namely to pick up where I’d left off by completing the access course I’d abandoned and getting myself into university. Until then I’d take things as they came, supplementing my income by working for my old man whenever possible and getting the most out of my relationship with Penny.

In the autumn of 1993 Penny moved out of her sister’s place and into a council house and, after giving it serious thought for all of five minutes, I went with her.

This wasn’t the smartest move I ever made.

Although Penny and I did have a lot in common I always knew there wasn’t enough of the right stuff to sustain the relationship long term and that living together would serve only to hasten the inevitable collapse of it all. Penny was, regardless of her many endearing and indeed admirable qualities, neurotic to the core and her reliance on an insalubrious cocktail of tranquilisers and anti-depressants, which swung her mood around so erratically that it was impossible to keep track, didn’t help matters.

And nowhere was her neurosis more pronounced than when it came to housework, which was like some kind of obsessive compulsive mania with her. She never, ever, stopped.

Although I was nothing like the disgusting slob I used to be, I still had a way to go before I was ready to be fully domesticated, which meant that moving in with someone like Penny was just asking for trouble and almost straight there were problems. Okay, I’m not going to deny that she had perfectly reasonable grounds for complaint but, rather than just explaining things rationally and asking that I make more of an effort to do my share of the chores, she had to hammer the point home with a series of ridiculously over-the-top hints. Typically, this involved following me around the house, waiting for me to make the slightest mess and then pitching a gale force duck fit about it. Whenever I made a cup of tea, for example, she would watch me like a hawk and if I spilled so much as a grain of sugar in the process would scream ‘ANTS!’ at the top of her voice before rushing over to wipe down every surface within arms reach.

And could I read a newspaper in peace? On a Sunday morning I’d come back from the local newsagent with copies of The Sunday Times and The Observer and sit down on the couch, kicking back and preparing to catch up on current affairs. As soon as my behind hit the cushions I’d hear the vacuum cleaner fire up and Penny would come marching into the room, ramming the business end into my feet at every opportunity while making disapproving tutting noises and announcing in a stage whisper that she wished she had enough spare time to read the Sunday papers.

Penny also nursed the paranoid conviction that while she was at work I spent all my time on the phone to people in Sheffield. Whenever a bill arrived she would come striding up to me, waving the thing in my face, jabbing her finger at the bottom line and snarling,

“That’s you ringing your friends in Sheffield.”

It didn’t matter how many times I pointed out that I was no longer in contact with anyone in Sheffield or that even if I was, any calls made to numbers outside the Lincoln area code would be flagged, Penny just knew what I was up to.

And of course there was no way her thirteen year old daughter might have been running up the bill by calling her friends.

Neither was there any point in me complaining about her snoring, which kept me awake all fucking night; or her refusal to come out and socialise with me; or her sudden (and total) loss of interest in sex because the excuse would always be the same.

“Look Dominic, it’s perfectly natural for women of my age to…”

There was not one of her absurd hang-ups or nerve-shreddingly irritating habits that Penny couldn’t rationalise away by reference to her time of life - she being all of thirty four years old.

Then there was the incident with the cat.

I’d came home from college one afternoon to find a teary-eyed Penny sitting on the couch with her sister who had her arm around, and was attempting to comfort, her near hysterical sibling. It took me a while to get the full story out of them and even then I had to pinch myself a couple of times just to make sure I wasn’t in the middle of some bizarre daydream.

Penny worked three nights a week at a geriatric care home and would get back just after nine in the morning when, if I had classes, I’d have already left the house. That particular morning she’d come home and couldn’t find the kitten we’d recently got. After searching the house from top to bottom and working herself into a frenzy she’d gone round to ask the neighbours if they’d seen it. They hadn’t, but one of them had mentioned in passing that they’d seen me leaving the house with a rucksack slung across my shoulder.

Upon hearing this Penny had leapt to the conclusion that I had the kitten in my rucksack and went charging off on all kinds of lunatic flights of fancy as to where I was taking the thing and what I intended to do to it once I got there. After spending most of the morning going frantic - and even calling the police to tell them what I’d supposedly done – she found the kitten in the garden shed when she’d gone to fetch something out of the freezer. The poor little mite must have wandered in and got trapped after a gust of wind blew the door shut.

“Have you finally lost your mind completely?” I asked her. “Why would I harm the bloody cat?”

I knew we were on the final countdown after that and sure enough we broke up in May of 1994.

Nevertheless, we managed to stay friends and the relationship did provide me with both an emotional breathing space and a solid enough base from which to successfully complete my access course and get a place on a media course at Sheffield Hallam University. On Wednesday 28^th September 1994 I fetched up in Sheffield for the third and (so far) final time.

I’d been there less than a week when Twiggy killed himself.

Following the night of December 7^th 1991 and Stu Llewellyn’s narrowly failed attempt on my life, my relationship with Twiggy had been stretched to breaking point. Even allowing for the way his amphetamine addiction had scrambled his brain and the hold Stu had over him with the guitar and everything else, I just couldn’t let it go about him giving up my address that night - and I certainly wasn’t having it that he had ever believed that Stu had wanted to apologise to me.

There’s a lot I’m prepared to forgive for the sake of a valued friendship but Twiggy had gone way beyond the pale with this and had changed something fundamental between us. Okay, I would still hang out with the guy but I wasn’t prepared to put myself in harm’s way for his sake – which I’ll do for my friends every time and without even thinking about it.

It’s a terrible thing to confess, but being able to downgrade Twiggy’s status did take a huge weight off my mind. Given his speed fuelled determination to crash and burn it came as a blessed relief that I was no longer under any obligation to stick around to get hit by, or have to pick up, pieces of flaming debris.

Then he met Sadie and the way this girl turned him around was nothing short of miraculous.

When Twiggy’s band had changed their line up the previous summer they’d recruited a guy called Jake Winters to take over on vocals. Jake lived in Grimsby and although he did most of his weekend socialising in Lincoln (or Nottingham) the other band members would occasionally go over to his neck of the woods and hang out in a rocker’s pub called the Angry Pirate. On one such occasion a gang of girls that Jake knew had come over to sit with them and by the time last orders was called Twiggy had a hot date lined up for the next time he was over that way.

For the bulk of Twiggy and Sadie’s early courtship I was licking my wounds in Sheffield and deliberately steering clear of Lincoln, but by the time I ventured over for a weekend visit a few months later I couldn’t believe the change in him. He was off the speed for a start, which meant he could sustain a conversation without careering off on some schizoid tangent thirty seconds in, he no longer had a complexion like cold porridge and, most strikingly of all, he’d lost the look of bug-eyed insanity he’d been wearing since the late Eighties.

This came as an especially pleasant surprise to me as I’d already written Twiggy off and considered it only a matter of time before he got locked up and/or sectioned for doing something even more mental than his trick with the blood-filled syringe and photograph of Tara Evans. I was pondering this encouraging new state of affairs on the train back to Sheffield and thinking that with Twiggy having beaten his amphetamine habit all he had to do now was to wean himself off his dependency on Stu.

That, as it happened, would take another year.

I’d not been back in Lincoln long when Twiggy’s band had acrimoniously parted company with their manager and, as a result, had lost their rehearsal room which was in a converted garage attached to his house. Following this their activities were put on hold until they could find somewhere else to practice.

Or so Stu was led to believe, the other guys were actually getting together and jamming in a rented room above a pub1. Jake, it transpired, was a pretty handy bassist and felt much more comfortable in that role than the lead vocal one (which had been given to a guy who was a student at a local teacher training college).

Stu was not a happy bunny when he discovered what was afoot and the first thing he did was to call on Twiggy to take his guitar back – the guitar he had assured Twiggy was his to keep whatever happened.

While this drama was unfolding I was, oblivious to it all, sitting in the Vaults and was just about to drink up and head off home when Twiggy and Sadie walked in. They came over, sat down and Sadie said to Twiggy,

“Go on then, tell him.”

“Remember all those times you tried to warn me about Stu?” Twiggy asked. “Well, everything you said about him was right and everything you said he’d do he did. I’m sorry Dom, I should have listened.”

Twiggy then, and presumably as a penitent gesture, volunteered an absolute wealth of information which he’d been privy to while in the enemy camp. This filled a lot of the gaps in my knowledge - even if it didn’t do my blood pressure too much good.

Amongst a whole host of other things (most of which concerned Sally) Twiggy finally put to bed the mystery of why I couldn’t get another band together following Badd Haddöck’s disintegration2. In the wake of the band’s demise, whenever Stu found out that I’d got someone interested in being part of the Mk III line up he’d find a way of ingratiating himself with them and, in his most unctuous and persuasive manner, convince them that I was a nightmare to work with, that I was always skipping rehearsals, that I turned up to gigs incapably drunk (okay, I did once but there were mitigating circumstances), that I tried to take credit for songs I didn’t write, that I’d play the other band members off each other etc. In fact he did such an effective hatchet job that by the summer of 1988 no local musician wanted anything to do with me and I gave up trying to form another band altogether.

And it wasn’t just confined to Lincoln, Stu’s bullshit acquired such a momentum that it managed to reach parts of South Yorkshire before I did. In the summer of 1990, when a certain Doncaster glam-metal band (who were more famous for their comedy name than anything else) were looking for a replacement second guitarist, it had knocked me out of contention before Mötley Süe, who knew the singer, had even introduced me to him in the Roxy one night.

Stu, Twiggy told me, had found that one absolutely hilarious.

Losing the Washburn wasn’t the end of Twiggy’s musical world though as he had quite a few guitar parts lying around including a Charvel neck, a Floyd Rose tremolo and a body he’d made on his Employment Training course. Within a couple of dole cheques he’d scraped together the other necessary bits and pieces to assemble an axe I jokingly dubbed Franken-Strat.

In September of 1993 Sadie went to the University of Manchester to do a Business Studies & Japanese Language degree and outside of the college recesses I rarely saw Twiggy as he spent practically every weekend at the other end of the A57 and most of the rest of his time rehearsing with the band.

Stu all but disappeared from the Vaults/Lazers scene after revealing his true self to Twiggy but in the early summer of 1994, round about the same time as Sadie finished her fresher year, he came crawling out of the woodwork to start sniffing around the guys in the band and trying to worm his way back into their confidence. I never quite figured out what his angle was with this – especially not as Twiggy, Jake and their drummer Alf were more than wise to him by that point - but then Stu was a very slippery customer and when he was being deliberately guarded there was no telling what he was up to.

With Sadie home for the summer I saw a lot more of Twiggy and often found myself wondering how much of an insufferable mope he was going to be when she had to go spend the second year of her degree studying in Japan. Sadie was due to leave half way through September and wouldn’t be back in the UK again until Easter. But then it wasn’t something I fretted about too much as I’d be in Sheffield over the same period and would presumably be spared the worst of it.

The fortnight before I started college was, to put it mildly, chaotic, chiefly because I still hadn’t got any digs sorted out and was trekking over to Sheffield almost every other day trying to find some. On the Friday before my course was due to commence I finally succeeded, snagging the attic room in a terraced house on a street opposite the Park Hill flats. To blow off the considerable head of steam that had built up over the previous couple of weeks I went down the Vaults and got absolutely hammered.

Twiggy wasn’t out that weekend as Sadie was jetting off to Japan on the Monday morning and until then he was spending every moment he could alone with her. From the moment Sadie’s plane left the ground he fell sick with despair and spent practically all his waking hours sitting by the phone waiting for her to call.

But I had more pressing matters to concern myself with and two days later unloaded a rented Astra estate at the house in Sheffield which was to be my home for the next nine months. The following afternoon, having spent the morning going through the enrolment and induction process at college, I called at the city centre BT shop to see about getting a phone line sorted out. This wasn’t as straight forward as it should have been; over the summer my house had been totally gutted and renovated meaning that the phone company had to send someone out to install a new junction box rather than just flick a switch at the central exchange. The practical upshot of this being that I wouldn’t be connected for the best part of another week and until then I was, as far as people in Lincoln were concerned, totally incommunicado.

The engineer came round on the Wednesday morning and when I finally got a dialling tone later that day I decided to ring round the folks back home to give them my number. The first person I called was Alf.

“Everyone’s been trying to get hold of you.” He spluttered before I’d finished saying hello. “Have you heard about Twiggy?”

“Don’t tell me, he’s tried to kill himself over Sadie.”

“No,” said Alf. “He succeeded. He hung himself last night. He’s dead.”

I would be a liar were I to say that I was entirely surprised to hear this – as would anybody who really knew Twiggy. Nevertheless, for years afterwards there were nights when I couldn’t sleep a wink because of the guilt I felt at not having been around during those crucial hours before he acted. Had I been then I know I would have picked up on something and would have refused to let him out of my sight until I was sure the mood had passed.

I wasn’t the only one to have had such feelings either; in order to try and cheer Twiggy up Jake had taken time off work to come over and spend what would be his last day with him. After hanging out in town and down the Vaults for most of the afternoon they had parted company and as Jake headed off to his car Twiggy had called after him,

“Look after yourself mate.”

Although he thought it a little out of character for Twiggy to say something like that, Jake said, it was only when he heard what had happened that the penny dropped and he realised it had actually been a final farewell.

What I didn’t know at the time was that Twiggy had fallen off the amphetamine wagon in a major way when Sadie left for Japan - which certainly explained a few things. Now drugs per se don’t turn people psychotic but what they sure as hell will do is to sniff out any latent psychosis and drag it screaming into the open. And if there was one thing Twiggy had boundless reserves of it was latent psychosis.

I can only assume that while he was in such a state of mind his situation must have seemed hopeless and suicide presented itself as the logical solution.

The funeral was scheduled for the Friday morning and I got the early train over to Lincoln and walked the short distance from the station to Alf’s house where a gang of people were meeting up beforehand. We left for the cemetery in a procession of cars and when we arrived there was Stu, who had positioned himself in pride of place next to Twiggy’s family.

“What’s he doing here?” I hissed at Alf through gritted teeth. “What can the bastard possibly be after now that Twiggy’s dead?”

I remember the vicar who conducted the brief graveside service looking a little harassed and I don’t suppose anyone could blame him seeing as he couldn’t have landed a less saintly or more intimidating looking congregation. When he asked if there was anything anyone would like to say Stu stepped up and, feigning sniffles, tears and a selection of emotions he was incapable of feeling, trotted out a string of platitudes and announced how much he was going to miss his great mate.

It was bad enough that Stu had the gall to turn up to the funeral at all but to perform this tawdry stunt was absolutely stomach turning, even for someone as shameless as him, and in that moment I understood my full capacity for hatred – which absolutely terrified me.

But then I like to think my capacity for the other extreme is equally impressive - which serves to balance it out.

That was the last time I ever saw Stu.

After the wake, being as tired and emotional as a newt, I called at my family home with the intention of staying overnight to sleep it off. As soon as I walked through the door I had my old dear start bitching and moaning about me being back in Lincoln when they’d only just got rid of me. Not being in any mood to handle her shit I turned around and headed back into town to catch the next train to Sheffield, calling at an off license en route to pick up a four pack for the journey.

Once off the train I hot footed it over the road to the student union bar where I bumped into some people on my course and ended up staying out until closing time. Then we took a cab up to a party in the Norfolk Park Student Village which, luckily enough, was within staggering distance of my new house.

When I eventually got home there was light on the horizon, birdsong in the air and I’d been boozing non-stop since noon the previous day. As I staggered through the door I fell sprawling over a pile of suitcases which indicated that at least one of my other housemates had moved in (until that day I had been the only tenant). After picking myself up I wobbled to my room, got undressed and passed out.

I can’t have been in bed an hour when I was called out of my intoxicated slumber by a fully distended bladder and, still three quarters asleep and senselessly drunk, went lurching off to relieve myself. I got to the toilet, fumbled my equipment out and let go a piss you could have gone white water rafting on. As I looked down, instead of seeing a toilet bowl, a bed slowly came into focus. I peered around, groggily trying to get my bearings and spotted a young lad with a terrified look on his noticeably wet face cowering in the corner of the room with a quilt pulled up around him.

I couldn’t have stopped the flow if my life had depended on it and not knowing what else to do I smiled and slurred,

“Hi. I’m Dom, I live in the attic.”

I kept the smile on my face as I waited several extremely uncomfortable minutes for the tanks to drain and then walked calmly out of the room.

That kind of set the tone for my relationship with this poor just-turned eighteen year old who, on his first night away from home, was woken up by some naked drunk pissing on him. Perhaps not surprisingly he moved out a few weeks later and probably still has nightmares about it.

As I’ve opined before, I believe we are drawn to those whose insecurities and personal foibles we share and would even go so far as to say that this is a significant part of what binds the members of bohemian sub-cultures together. Although it would be a little melodramatic to describe my peers and I as ‘wounded people’ most of us had a marked inclination in that direction (think slight seconds rather than damaged goods) and I suspect that even the few who did appear to have their heads screwed on properly had got them cross-threaded.

With Twiggy and I it was a deep seated neediness and emotional frailty which was why, despite our macho bluster to the contrary, we both required the security of a steady relationship before we could even think about setting ourselves any other goals. It was also why we would both come so spectacularly unravelled when those relationships hit the rocks. That said, Twiggy was apt to get a damned sight loopier than I did and I was never, no matter how bad things got, suicidal3. In this respect Twiggy provided a reassuring yardstick of spurned derangement and I always found it a tremendous comfort to know that there was at least one of my intimates to make me look relatively stable.

Now that he was gone I became the one to set the standard - which wasn’t a mantle I was too thrilled to inherit.

The premature and utterly needless death of a friend and kindred spirit is, as I’m sure those who don’t know can well imagine, a traumatic and deeply affecting experience which prompts a good deal of anxious soul searching. Perhaps it brought home my own mortality and made me realise that I wasn’t going to live forever – not even if I did quit smoking and boozing so much. But whatever else it did, it made me appreciate that life is too short, and our time on earth far too precious, to bear petty grudges and for that reason I decided to go patch things up with Mikki.

During university enrolment I’d bumped into another Rebels veteran who told me that Mikki was now gainfully employed and living with some girl in the new flats on the other side of Devonshire Green. So on the Sunday evening after Twiggy’s funeral I called Mikki’s parents to get his address and phone number. Mikki’s old man answered the phone and, for reasons he wouldn’t be drawn on, refused to give me either. Instead he took my details, telling me he’d pass them on straight away.

A few minutes later the phone rang and when I picked up a girl’s voice asked if Dom was there. I told her he was and that she was talking to him.

“Hi Dom I bet you can’t guess who this is.”

“Nope, you’re absolutely right, I can’t.”

“Its Sarah, you remember, Sarah from Doncaster? Me and Mikki are living together now.”

I was just about to say that the only Sarah from Doncaster I could remember was that dozy cow who insisted on calling herself ‘Sass’, the one Danny had nailed in the Hornblower toilets back in 1990 (see Chapter 4) when I realised that it was her!

“What, the Sarah from Doncaster who used to hang around with Lisa from Edlington?” I asked, trying to be diplomatic and at the same time sound pleasantly surprised.

“That’s right.”

The next evening, as I made my way round to their flat, I was still struggling to understand why Mikki, whose women were always such primo catches, was with her. But then I reprimanded myself; people do mature, I wouldn’t have thanked someone for judging the contemporary me by 1990 standards and at least she’d stopped using the laughably contrived nickname ‘Sass’ which showed she’d grown up that much.

Sarah answered the door and showed me in and she seemed pleasant enough when I got talking to her. The same, however, couldn’t be said for Mikki; from the moment I arrived until the moment I left I felt about as welcome as a cockroach infestation and got the distinct impression that he really didn’t want me there. The feeling was compounded when I tried to get him to come out for a drink sometime and he wouldn’t even consider it. His rationale being that, a few months previously, Sarah and his ex Ellen had had a major punch up from which Sarah had emerged the clear victor. Consequently Ellen’s new boyfriend and his pals had let it be known that they would be looking out for Mikki and Sarah to give them both a seriously good hiding (this was why Mikki’s old man had been so cagey about handing over his details).

Then, straight out of the blue, Mikki announced that Sarah had to be at work early the next morning and needed to go to bed and that was the end of the evening.

I called Mikki several times over the next few weeks but kept getting an answering machine and, God knows why this of all things should have stayed with me, I can still remember the message.

‘Hi there, we’re not in the moment, we’ve probably gone out for a curry or something (rock & fucking roll dude), but if you leave your number we’ll get back to you.’

They never did, so, for the second time in as many years, I thought fuck him. Mulling it over later I figured that Mikki had just moved on from wanting to hang around with people like me.

But then so had I.

I saw Danny about a week later. Danny had moved to Nottingham shortly after I’d gone back to Lincoln in April of 1993 and was in Sheffield visiting his brother. He’d got my phone number off my parents and called to arrange to meet up in the Yorkshireman. With my head being full of university and whatnot and with Danny still drunkenly arsing about on the dole we didn’t really have anything left to talk about. Ashamed as I am to admit it, I was quite snotty and obnoxious and dropped countless hints that I couldn’t wait to get away. All I can say in my defence is that I still hadn’t garnered maturity and experience enough to understand that a person’s worth is determined not by any extraneous bullshit, but by what they carry in their heart.

It would be over fourteen years before Mikki, Danny and I met up again.

As well as changing my circle of friends and acquaintances my taste in music was undergoing a radical transformation too. During that first year at college I would regularly tune in to a pirate radio station called Dance FM which broadcast out of a high-rise flat on Norfolk Park and played, as the name suggests, a house-heavy blend of electronic dance music. A few weeks into the summer recess of 1995 some college pals and I went to one of the monthly dos the station used to promote at the City Hall Ballroom. The next weekend we took it to the next level and visited a club called Wonderland which was where I scored my first hit of ecstasy and really understood what it was all about.

But that’s another story – maybe I’ll tell you about it someday.

Right then, I imagine by this point everyone’s itching to know what happened between me and Sally following the cataclysmic events of the previous chapter.

Well, it would be nice to say that everything came to a neat, rom-com style happy ending…

But it didn’t.

Sally wasn’t being driven to Lincoln train station by her mother when a soft-focus montage of the good times started playing in her mind’s eye, prompting a single tear to run down her cheek and fall to the floor in slow motion. She didn’t jump out of the car at the next red light and sprint to my house through the pouring rain. I didn’t answer the door to see her standing there, shamefaced and waterlogged. She didn’t tell me that she was just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her. And when I didn’t ask her to come in out of the rain she didn’t say: “Is it still raining? I hadn’t noticed”.

Neither was I driving back to Lincoln the morning after a Roxy night when I had a flashback of that last passionate snog in Lazers and a look of grim determination crossed my face as I drove straight past the A57 exit and stayed on the M1. The van didn’t grind to a halt in a cloud of smoke just as I hit the outskirts of London, forcing me to abandon it in the middle of the road and sprint to the nearest tube station where I vaulted the ticket barrier and took the most direct route to Sally’s college. I didn’t burst into one of her lectures, barging the tutor out of the way before delivering my love-confessional speech from the lectern and in front of an audience of bewildered second year drama students. There wasn’t a dramatic silence while all eyes fell on Sally as she slowly started to smile and ran to the front of the room, jumping into my arms as What Makes the World Go Round by Kiss started playing and the end credits rolled.

No, that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because real life isn’t scripted by Richard Curtis and neither does it have an extras menu from which to select an alternate ending - even if my director’s cut has restored several key scenes which were deleted from Sally’s theatrical release of the movie.

But the world keeps on turning and eventually you get over it. Detachment helps speed the healing process too and when I ran away to Sheffield I decided to cut myself off from anything to do with, or that might remind me of, Sally. To this end I made it quite clear to the Vaults contingent that I would not take kindly to anyone giving her my address. So in May of 1992 I was a little miffed when I got a letter from her. It was Molly, I discovered after making a couple of phone calls, who had squealed and I made a mental note to give her a severe dressing down the next time I was in Lincoln.

I was caught rather off guard by this and found myself pacing up and down the hallway with the letter in my hand as I tried to decide whether to open it or just burn the thing and let Sally know that any further correspondence would meet the same fate.

Curiosity got the better of me.

What I read was a confusing mixture of hot and cold, a noncommittal ramble which said nothing in itself but reading between the lines, as I had learned to do with everything Sally said or wrote, it came across very much like she was regretting what she’d done and was having second thoughts – even if she was holding back from saying as much.

And yes, I was perfectly well aware that wishful thinking may have helped to deliver that verdict so I got some third party opinions. I showed the letter to Tina and Ellen and also to the girls in the flat above ours. After giving them an outline of the affair I asked what they made of it. Every one of them came to the same conclusion I had.

The next day, having slept on it, I wrote a cautious reply asking Sally to cut to the chase and tell me what she really wanted.

The letter I got back was rather more strident and wasn’t so much a proposal of reconciliation as a diktat complete with the terms under which our renewed friendship was to proceed.

I answered this very bluntly and by return of post, telling Sally that until she was prepared to admit what she did, admit why she did it and say sorry there could be no question of restoring diplomatic relations.

Her reply to this one gave me considerable pause and made me wonder whether she’d recently suffered a sharp blow to the head. Instead of addressing the concerns I’d raised she used two sides of A4 to tell me that I had to stop dwelling on the past and understand that she didn’t want a relationship with me.

This was to become a constant refrain of Sally’s over the next few years. It was as if she had some kind of data processing glitch in the cognition centres of her brain whereby whenever I told her that we could never be friends until she was prepared to accept responsibility and express remorse for what she’d done she perceived it as, ‘if you don’t consent to a committed relationship with me then I’ll hate you forever’. Another mantra Sally would constantly chant was that I couldn’t hold her responsible for what Stu had done. I never did, I held her responsible for deliberately provoking him into doing it.

It was a struggle to maintain a civil tone in reply to this and, after forcefully reiterating the points I’d made in my previous letter, I couldn’t resist making a snide dig about ‘that one special man who will always hold my heart in his hands’ and asking Sally whether he still did.

Although her response to that didn’t quite display the chutzpah of ‘If he says we spent this afternoon in bed together then he’s lying’ it wasn’t lagging too far behind.

‘Stu hurt both of us but if we let that stop us being friends then it means he’s won’.

As if the whole cynical pantomime had been instigated by Stu rather than for his sake.

I lost my temper after that and told Sally to fuck off and stop wasting my time.

A couple of months later I found out - and quite by accident after Wendy had mentioned it thinking I already knew - that Sally had been seeing some guy in London during the early spring of 1992 and had broken up with him shortly before I’d received her letter.

A year later, when I got another letter which, predictably enough, sparked off a similar shit storm, it turned out she’d broken up with someone immediately beforehand too.

As she had just before Easter of 1994 when, instead of writing, she came up to me in Lazers and shoved a can of Red Stripe in my hand.

And in 1996, when I had been the one to extend the olive branch - and had been surprised by the enthusiasm with which Sally had seized it - it turned out that yet another of her ill-conceived romances had recently gone pear shaped.

She was still using me as an emotional crutch4 - exactly as she had done over the summer and autumn of 1991. And I was soft enough to let her - right up to the point where my patience ran out and we started screaming at each other again.

Sally would always tell people that we fell out because I kept pushing for a full on relationship rather than just accepting her as a friend - which simply wasn’t true. We fell out because she refused, and I mean flat out refused, to give me the apology and explanation I was still owed. Sally expected me to forgive and forget but wasn’t prepared to honour her side of the contract by expressing contrition. Indeed, every time I raised the issue she would fly into fits of piqued hysterics and accuse me of trying to emotionally blackmail her. It was as if she believed there to be some kind of statute of limitations on these things and that if they aren’t mentioned for long enough then they cease to be an issue.

Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. Unless you lance, drain and cauterise the boil it just festers away until it erupts in a volcano of stinking pus.

I wanted to bury the hatchet with Sally, I honestly did. I’d much rather resolve conflict than have to prolong it indefinitely. For a start, it’s far less effort to be pleasant than it is to be obnoxious (especially when you take as much pride in your performance as I do). It would also have lightened the uncomfortably edgy atmosphere which always resulted when the two of us were in the Vaults at the same time.
But then it wasn’t my intransigence making that impossible - it was hers.

In May of 1996 Sally had, at my invitation, come over to Sheffield with Alf and his then girlfriend for a night at one of the house clubs a load of us former metal heads had become regular faces at. I never managed to pin down exactly what it was, and I often pondered the matter, but after that night a layer of tension seemed to lift, things settled down and the atmosphere between us was nothing like as fraught at it had been.

Over the next year we exchanged the occasional letter and I would call her every now and again just to say hello and see how she was doing. As for the other business, well, I figured that Sally would get around to that in her own time. After all, it had taken long enough before I was willing to admit that the things I’d done (and not just to her but to plenty of other girls too) had been inexcusable – and even longer to proactively seek forgiveness for them.

However, this was naïve of me to say the least; Sally wasn’t even prepared to come clean about how she found out I was at Jo’s place that night in January of 1990. Right up until our last ever conversation, almost eight years after the fact, she still insisted on maintaining the fiction that it was Kiera Jones who had inadvertently blurted it out – and even though she knew that I’d double-bluffed Kiera into admitting that it wasn’t almost immediately afterwards. If I imagined that Sally was ever going to volunteer an explanation of, let alone an apology for, the events of that Christmas when I gave her my heart and the very next day was almost blown away, then I was every bit as deluded as she had been in believing that Stu’s affair with Louise Williams had been nothing but a spiteful lie cooked up by me and Wendy.

In the summer of 1997 Sally moved back to Lincoln after four largely inconsequential post-graduate years in London when she’d split her time between working at her former student union and as a care assistant in a residential psychiatric unit.

At the same time I found myself between addresses in Sheffield and was crashing on a pal’s couch for a couple of weeks until my new flat became available. I was also working twelve hour shifts at the Royal Mail sorting office and, more to get a couple of nights sleep in a comfortable bed than anything else, was spending my weekends at my parents’ house in Lincoln.

One Saturday I had arranged to go for a lunchtime drink with my old flame Penny Michaels. We met in the bus station and were making our way through the Cornhill precinct when Sally came out of the Vaults, caught sight of us and walked hurriedly past, giving us as wide a berth as the available space allowed and trying just a little too hard to keep her gaze focussed anywhere but in my direction.

“Why did Sally just pretend she hadn’t seen you?” Penny asked me.

I had no idea but as I’d been meaning to drop her a line anyway I thought I’d use the opportunity to ask.

On the train back to Sheffield the next evening I wrote Sally a short letter telling her that I’d be in town again next weekend and asking if she might like to go for a drink and catch up chat. I should point out that this was a perfectly innocent request, in spite of everything I was still fond of Sally and I genuinely did care what happened to her.

As a PS I mentioned seeing her coming out of the Vaults and jokily asked if I’d done or said something to annoy her and if so whether that had been why she’d walked straight past me.

That must have touched a raw nerve because the first line of her reply was a very indignant,

‘I’m sorry to hear that you think (my emphasis) I’m ignoring you’.

Sally had a number of tells, both verbally and in her body language, to indicate when she was being less than truthful and this turn of phrase was one of them, one she’d often used during our postal slanging matches. She’d seen me alright and it was the manner of her denial that had confirmed it.

Nevertheless, Sally agreed to meet me and I was to let her know where and at what time.

The Vaults was a definite no no. As it was I hadn’t set foot in the place for well over a year following a number of ugly fall outs I’d had with some of the people who drank there. The most serious of these involved several hundred quid’s worth of a South American commodity which I’d got on tick from a source in Sheffield and had been left holding with no way to pay for when the useless clowns who’d asked me to sort them out had failed to get the money to me on time.

I had to call in a lot, and I mean a lot, of favours to wriggle out of the shit that dropped me in.

When I’d gone over to Lincoln to have a word with these buffoons their dismissive, blasé attitude had pushed me so close to wrapping bar stools around their heads that I didn’t trust myself to be able to resist the temptation a second time and thought it best for all concerned if I just stayed out of the way.

So I suggested we meet in the Falcon on Saltergate, which was where the more Nineties oriented boho set would hang out (and who would contemptuously refer to the Vaults crowd as ‘the Dire Straits fans’).

And when the Falcon kicked out?

At this time Lazers was undergoing one of its periodic attempts to rebrand itself by changing the name to ‘Sugarcubes’ and ditching the established weekend rock nights in favour of hiring the place out to a cabal of local house and rave promoters. For after hours entertainment Lincoln’s metal heads then had a choice of two venues. The most popular was a dive called Badgers, which was a run down former snooker hall with a late license and a makeshift DJ booth shoved in one corner. Alternatively there was a subterranean nightclub called Barracuda’s which, although not hosting a rock do as such, had a relaxed door policy which meant they could get in without having to compromise their appearance.

Provided we were still standing come pub closing time, I suggested we go up to Badger’s.

At around eight o’clock on the following Saturday night I met Sally in the Falcon where we stayed for all of ten minutes after some annoying drunk insisted on parking himself next to us and knocking glasses over left right and centre. After making our excuses and leaving we went up to the Jolly Brewer on Broadgate where we got our drinks, found a table and sat down.

Post Christmas 1991 conversations with Sally always followed the same pattern and that night was no exception; we would drink and relax and talk and laugh but as soon as Sally realised that we were getting on a little too well she would clumsily dredge up some past unpleasantry to sour the atmosphere and kill the conversation. This really used to wind me up – and not because I was trying to seduce her with my charm and patter, but precisely because I wasn’t.

But then Sally never was able to cope with the idea that I could enjoy her company without having some kind of ulterior sexual motive. Doubtless this misguided conceit stemmed from the same character defining inferiority complex as the rest of her overcompensatory grandstanding.

A couple of times during the night Sally asked if I remembered a guy called Jeff Palmer who I apparently used to go skateboarding with in the late Seventies and who said hello. Even though there was a vaguely familiar ring to the name, one that probably was coming from that direction, I couldn’t put a face to it - which I found surprising as the old skateboard crew were a very colourful and charismatic bunch of kids and I remember them very clearly. My curiosity had been aroused though and from what Sally said this fellow seemed to know a great deal about me. I guessed that when I saw him later on (apparently he was going to be at Badger’s) it would jog my memory.

Shortly after time was called in the ‘Brewer we went up to Badger’s where I was introduced to my erstwhile skate buddy almost as soon as we walked through the door.

I didn’t recognise or remember him at all.

It took me a little while before I twigged that he and Sally were an item. This was partly due to how much I’d drunk, which had taken the edge off my perception, but it was mainly because…it was mainly because…

How can I put this without sounding like I’m…?

Let’s just say that I had no idea Sally’s taste in men had become so unusual. With Stu and the others she had been involved with (or had had the hots for) I always understood the attraction. With this one, who looked like he would struggle to understand the concept behind toilet paper and who probably wore his hair long purely to hide the bolts in his neck, it was a total and utter mystery (it did occur to me that maybe he had a ‘nice personality’ but that was rather tricky to tell when he seemed to communicate almost entirely in consonants).

We were in Badger’s just over an hour and for the whole time Sally made a ludicrously exaggerated display of flirting with her new beau and of blanking me. This was so infuriatingly typical of the girl who, when I’d asked if she’d like to go for a drink, couldn’t just level with me and explain – as Penny did eighteen months later and under similar circumstances - that she’d started seeing someone and that for the two of us to go out together might be a little inappropriate at the moment.

Oh no, not Sally Anne Spencer who had to make a public spectacle of shoving it down my throat with this patronising and entirely unnecessary routine.

By about half twelve I’d had enough bullshit for one night and went to take a final piss before heading off home. When I came out of the toilets Mr Palmer was conspicuous by his absence and Sally was standing on her own looking nervous. She had obviously been waiting for me and came over to announce that she was going to Barracuda’s before turning tail and scurrying off towards the exit.

I yelled after her to hang on as I was going in the same direction and that I’d walk with her.

Barracuda’s was only round the corner from Badger’s, not fifty yards away, and we walked the entire distance in silence. As we drew level with the club’s entrance I turned to Sally expecting her to say goodnight or something and, without even acknowledging me, she went strolling casually through the doorway and vanished from sight.

I stood rooted to the spot as I tried to figure out what point Sally thought she’d just made by snubbing me and, more puzzlingly, why she’d sent her new other half to Barracuda’s ahead of her when she’d spent the past hour doing everything she could to show me that they were together.

Penny’s house was on the way back to my parents’ and noticing that the downstairs lights were still on I called in and was very graciously allowed to throw a dummy spitting hissy fit about the night’s events while chugging down a bottle of wine and eventually passing out in an armchair.

I was still seriously irate when I arrived back in Sheffield the next evening and made a beeline for the nearest pub where, inspired by innumerable pints of Stella, I expressed my displeasure in a drunken rant which I posted to Sally on the way back to my friend’s couch.

I realised how toe-curlingly idiotic this had been the moment I woke up; apart from anything else, my inebriated communiqué was an admission in so many words that I’d lost my cool and I knew exactly how Sally would interpret that. When I got to work that afternoon I put the entire late shift on red alert looking out for the bloody thing – but all in vain and it slipped through.

And that, dear reader, was the last contact Sally and I would ever have.

Again, I’m not entirely sure why, but after the business at Badger’s I was finally able to let go and write the whole sorry business off to experience. What’s more, once I stopped viewing Ms Spencer through the distorting prism of sentimentality a somewhat clearer picture presented itself.

Sally’s moral cowardice and rank insincerity were not, as it had suited me to believe for so long, merely symptoms of emotional immaturity that she would grow out of. They were both coded into her DNA. Similarly, the reason I could always second guess her (up to and including her reaction to, and the way she tried to spin, the online version of this opus) wasn’t because we shared some kind of extrasensory connection. It was because she really was that shallow and predictable.

The incident also steeled a growing determination to cut loose from Lincoln entirely - and if not forever then at least for the foreseeable future. Everybody knew I was meeting Sally that night and I had been monumentally pissed off that no one had thought to let me know she was seeing someone. Had they done then maybe I wouldn’t have walked so blindly into a situation which had been at least partially - if not entirely - intended to humiliate me.

There were other things too, such as the aforementioned fall outs with people down the Vaults, but generally speaking I was just sick and tired of being disappointed and let down all the time. Maintaining links with the old scene really was becoming much more trouble than it was worth and at the end of the day added up to one more level of stress that I could well do without – particularly when I’d only recently made it out the other side of Episode Number Two and was still picking through the wreckage and trying to salvage what I could from that5.

When I moved into my new flat I rang Penny and Fergie, gave them both my address and phone number and told them to pass the information along to anyone who wanted to get in touch.

Evidently no one did and over the next two years you could count the number of visits I made to Lincoln – including Christmas with my family - on the fingers of one hand.

Then, in the first week of August of 1999, I got a call from Fergie who told me he had just bumped into someone from Lincoln (Fergie was working in London at the time) who had told him that Webbo had been knocked off his motorbike and killed.

Webbo, who was one of the old Vaults crowd we met briefly a few chapters back, had been cast into outer darkness in the autumn of 1995 after abandoning his live-in girlfriend and running off with a girl called Kerry who was – just to complicate things further - married to his mate Ricky and no one had had more than a passing contact with him since.

I don’t want to go on about this too much but I have to say that I always found the hypocrisy of Webbo’s shunning a little squalid. For a start Ricky was hardly a paragon of monogamous virtue and had boned plenty of other women (Sally being one of them) while he was with this girl and besides, by the time the dirty deed was done their marriage was nothing but a loveless sham anyway. That’s not to say I condoned Webbo’s conduct, but relationships within that incestuous tribe always ended with one of the couple shagging someone else from the same gang. Why should he have been singled out for such virulent condemnation?

“Well, it was a really shitty thing to do.” People would invariably say.

Yes it was, but then so was what Sally did to me - how come she wasn’t ostracised? At least Webbo and Kerry were genuinely in love and went on to marry and have children. What good came from Sally’s actions? The only person to benefit from that was a poisonous psychopath who enjoyed a brief ego trip and was allowed to get away with attempted mass murder.

Anyway, as soon as I came off the phone I dug my old address book out and started calling round to get the full story. By the time I had it I’d also missed Webbo’s funeral, which I was none too pleased about.

Mind you, my activities had sent ripples across the surface of the Lincoln pond and for the next few days I received a steady stream of e-mails and phone calls from people who were wondering what had happened to me (apparently I’d ‘disappeared’). Following this I decided to end my self-imposed exile and start visiting my home town more often and on a more sociable basis.

Every two or three months thereafter someone would be celebrating a birthday or various of the Lincoln diaspora would be back in town and I’d take a trip over, meet up with everyone and go for a night out boozing around the townie pubs. Although the Vaults - which by this time was rocking a vibe about as happening as a cot death support group - wasn’t a scheduled stop on our route there were plenty of the former patrons scattered around town to bump into. There were maybe half a dozen occasions over the next couple of years when I was introduced to people in some noisy city centre bar and the following conversation – or a variation of it - would occur.

“This is our friend Dom, he’s over from Sheffield for the weekend.”

“Hi Dom, so how do you know Phoebe and…”

“Hang on a minute. You’re Dom? Dom who lives in Sheffield?”

“I hope you’re not (nervous laugh) the Dom who lives in Sheffield that Sally Spencer used to go out with!”

Awkward pause…

“Actually I am the Dom who lives in Sheffield that Sally Spencer used to go out with. Why do you hope I’m not?”

They’d immediately recoil as if having noticed that I had cloven hooves, a pair of horns and a half eaten baby clutched in one of my claws. Once the initial shock had subsided and they were reasonably sure I wasn’t going to bite, I would be given Sally’s revisionist account of our history, of the depravities I’d committed while we were seeing each other and how, when she and Stu had split up and I wanted to get back with her, I wouldn’t take no for an answer and would stalk her and bombard her with hate mail and what a mentally unstable and emotionally disturbed fruitcake I was6.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the events of December 1991, as well as those leading up to it all, had been carefully airbrushed from the picture.

Of course by that point in the evening I’d have drunk far too much to be able to articulate the complexities of what had really happened between us and would be plunged into a filthy mood which would ruin the rest of my night and have me fuming about it all the way home.

The nerve that girl displayed in usurping the moral high ground took my breath away. How dare she play the victim and cast me as the villain of the piece?

In the spring of 2002 this happened once too often.

I’d been in Lincoln one Friday night for a house warming party and on my way back to Sheffield the next afternoon had called in at the Falcon just to see if anyone was about. The only recognisable faces in the pub belonged to a guy known as Pat ‘Rhino’ Ryan, who had been seeing Wendy on and off for a couple of years, and his sidekick Luke Smithson. I’d often spoken to and got on quite well with Rhino but only had a nodding acquaintance with Luke - who had arrived on the Lincoln rock scene round about the same time as I’d left it - and we’d never really talked.

I waved a greeting on my way to the bar, got a drink and went over to sit down. I’d just taken my seat when Rhino discovered that he was nearly out of money and excused himself before nipping out to the cash point. With Rhino gone there was a short silence which Luke broke by saying,

“Your ex doesn’t like you very much does she?”

At first I thought he meant Molly Richards, who, the last I’d heard, had been living with a mate of Luke’s.

“Go on then, what’s Molly been saying about me?” I asked.

“No, I didn’t mean Molly, I was talking about Sally Spencer.”

Let’s put that conversation on hold for a moment and take one last trip down the Vaults to get some background.

The Nineties, at least as experienced by the rest of the country, never really caught on in that particular establishment and the regulars managed to sustain a facsimile of the previous decade’s rock and metal scene right up until the pub closed for good in January of 2002. So when Sally moved back to Lincoln in the summer of 1997 and walked into the place wearing the same clothes and hairstyle she had on when I first met her almost ten years earlier it caused quite a stir.

And where the single males were concerned it caused much the same kind of stir as releasing an ovulating hind into an enclosure full of rutting stags would. Suffice it to say that the competition for her favours had been rather heated.

Luke, I discovered, had been one of the runners up in the ensuing mêlée and told me that when he made his play Sally had spent so long slagging me off and ranting on about what a bastard I was and how deeply I’d wounded her, and how the experience had affected the way she related to men for years afterwards that he couldn’t get a word in edgeways.

While it was hardly the first time I’d heard all this, what set me off was that the exchange would have taken place before our last meeting, when Sally and I were still on what I thought were reasonably friendly terms.

As I was entirely sober I thought I’d take the opportunity to put Luke right on a few things but was becoming so consumed by rage that I couldn’t think where to start. After taking a deep breath and composing myself as best I could I asked,

“And when Sally was delivering her tirade did she happen to mention that in the summer of 1991 I gave her a sincere and unconditional apology for the things I’d done and the hurt I caused?”

“Did she tell you what she went on to do in spite of that?”

“Did she tell you how she allowed me – encouraged me even - to fall in love with her all over again and pretended to rekindle our relationship just to get a rise out of Stu Llewellyn?”

“Did she tell you that I got my face kicked in as a direct result of her stupid, adolescent prank and came within a soggy cigarette lighter of being blown to fucking pieces because of it?”

Luke’s baffled - and extremely uncomfortable - expression made it perfectly clear that he had no idea what I was talking about and, making a supreme effort to stay calm, I asked again,

“Did that lying, deceitful, two-faced twat make any mention of what she did to me?”

Obviously not.

I was seething about that for weeks afterwards and it put such a bee in my bonnet that I decided – no matter what the cost or bother – to get my version of events into circulation.

And you’ve just read it.

05/08/2010

Some Grotty Flat on the Birchwood Estate

Lincoln.