LITMIR.BIZ

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on the dirty settees or on the ashtray floor at the time. Life was simple—and wonderfully grim. There were no real jobs at the time, well no real jobs you would risk dropping off the dole for, only picking turnips or packing fish fingers. All we lived for was the giro every fortnight, and so life was a waiting game, eking out our £24 a week by eating potatoes, sitting around figuring out what to do with our lives and attempting to mend the windows.

      Wayne had been in the house longer than me, and so had a room with a lock on the door, and spent all his days trying to make the ultimate compilation tape. He was impulsive, and would often blow his whole giro in a day, then spend the next two weeks simply living on chips. Once he lived for a week on nothing but powdered bran and water.

      We lived mainly for the nights, getting into cheap nightclubs and stealing drinks from students. I loved dancing, but for me it was simply training. With my eyes closed, I imagined myself far away on a distant mountain.

      Each night when I got home I would jump in my mouldy sleeping bag and wrap myself up in blankets from Oxfam, burying myself so deep it was almost impossible to wipe away the feathers that tickled my nose as they escaped from the tired cotton shell of my bag.

      The room contained all my possessions, packed tightly under the bed and hidden behind bin bags in case anyone tried to steal them. My curtain wall was no defense against anything, and anyway the flat had no lock on the door. In fact, I’m not sure it even had a door.

      Under my bed was all my outdoor gear, each piece more valuable to me than anything in the world. I would lie there, my hat on, listening to the wind outside and inside, and imagine I was somewhere else: Death Bivy on the Eiger, the South Col of Everest, the summit of Fitzroy. The colder the place, the warmer I felt. For me this was all simply training for my escape.

      I was dropped off near Kendal, scrambling over piles of snow beside the motorway as my lift sped off, my hitching over. I pulled the rucksack tight onto my back, did up its hip belt and started walking towards the mountains in my army boots. I’d hitched to the hills before, but only with other people, generally with disastrous consequences. The last time had been to the Peak District with Wayne, who’d run a mile when he saw a sheep. He’d never seen a real one before. But this time I’d come alone.

      The mountains disappeared into the dark before I reached them, and so I spent the first night under two wooden pallets propped against a dry stone wall.

      The morning dawned cold, and my trusty cotton sleeping bag was stiff as I packed it away, the feathers that escaped as I pushed it into its stuff-sack blowing away across the snow.

      I reached the mountains and began up a ridge, excited to kick my way up patches of snow, to feel the ground fall away, until I reached the top. There was so much space, and it was all mine.

      Moving along the tops I scrambled down to a lake, its surface frozen thick, and put up my tiny orange cotton tent.

      I stayed there a week, picking off tops and coming back to the tent each evening, where I’d lie in my bag as my tea slowly warmed on my meths stove, the porch open, looking out into the dark, listening to the crack of the ice, the wind blowing around me.

      Each night my tent got frostier and frostier. The foot section of my sleeping bag froze solid, forcing me to wrap my feet in my fleece jacket.

      On the last evening, still hungry after a tiny portion of curry and rice, my diet dictated by my giro and the budget constraints of my daily allowance at the ‘Scoop and Weigh’, I lay and thought about my future, a span of time that seemed as black and empty as the night.

      Next day, I stood by the side of the road for what felt like hours until I got a lift to Bolton with a roofer, then to Leeds with a man who ran a mobile disco. After being picked up by the police for walking down the side of the motorway, and dropped at the services, I hitched a lift with a trucker bound for Hull docks, his cab the first really warm place I’d been for a long time.

      Hitching always came with risks, and I’d come across my fair share of scary characters on the road, but this trucker was one of the good ones. He was probably in his fifties, kind of unhealthy-looking in a truck-driver way, but stopping at a snack wagon he bought me a cup of tea and told me how, at nineteen, he’d hitched all the way from Scotland to South Africa. He told me tales of being stuck for days on African roads, where lions roamed in the bush, of gun barrels being jabbed into ribs, of sandstorms and sunsets, tsetse flies and bivies in Timbuktu. I listened to him, and envied his stories, the adventure, his guts to just do it.

      ‘Why did you come back?’ I asked.

      ‘It was the best thing I ever did, and I enjoyed every minute of it, but when I got to Cape Town all I could think about was going home.’

      ‘What did you do next?’ I was imagining further adventures.

      ‘I got married and started driving trucks.’

      I was dropped off near the docks and walked back towards the squat, popping in to a friend’s house to cadge a cup of tea on the way. The house was full of students, who always seemed to me to have a limitless amount of money back then, and who, it seemed, did no more work than Wayne or me. The settee was full of long-haired students smoking skinny rollies and watching Taxi Driver on a small black-and-white TV. Out of the kitchen came an attractive woman with crazy curls of red hair whom I’d never seen before.

      ‘Hello,’ she said, surprised at someone new coming in the door. ‘Would you like some food?’ She spooned out a big plate of veg and rice, the best meal I’d seen for a long time.

      I suppose I fell in love with her at that moment.

      Her name was Mandy. She was a student at the university, doing a French degree, and had come back to Hull from France where she’d been working in a school. I’d heard lots about her from other people, as she’d been a DJ at a popular nightclub before she went, and was one of the cooler of Hull’s many Indie kids.

      Trauma was in the air, and I soon found out why everyone was so glued to the TV. Mandy had just found out that her best friend’s boyfriend had been two-timing the friend while she was living in London. She’d just told her friend over the phone. Now she had to find said boyfriend and tell him she’d spilled the beans and get him to ring his now ex.

      ‘Who’s coming with me?’ said Mandy, addressing the room. All eyes were uncomfortably but firmly fixed on De Niro.

      No one said a word.

      ‘I’ll come,’ I said, in an unusual fit of gallantry.

      I think I felt obliged after my free meal, and also because I quite liked the idea of spending some time with her, and so we put on our coats and began walking the streets, looking for the boyfriend. Mandy was unlike anyone else I’d ever met. She seemed full of light and ideas. She lived in France, she wanted things. No, she expected things. She had the touch of possibility that was missing from most of the people I knew. She also had a sadness about her. Maybe she was just as lost as me.

      We tramped through the dark streets, knocking on doors where we thought we’d find the boyfriend, until we knew where he was.

      ‘Stay here, I’ll go and talk to him,’ I said, leaving her at the street corner—another uncharacteristic act of chivalry, as I’d rather have sat with the rest of them and watched Taxi Driver. But I hadn’t, and, in that moment, she fell in love with me.

      I knocked on the door.

      Later, I walked Mandy home and said goodnight, then went back to the squat, up the fire-escape, past the broken door, and into the scruffy kitchen, where a pan of chips bubbled on the stove. The living room was full of people smoking dope and talking about how we were all going to be drafted into the Gulf War. I doubted they’d make very good soldiers.

      I went to my room and, pulling back the curtain, dropped my rucksack on the floor. The space seemed darker and more depressing than usual, and I could see the poverty of my surroundings. But then I thought about my trip and the wall with pallets stacked against it, about bush shelters, ditches, and all the other places I’d slept. I didn’t live here. This place

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