3:AM Magazine

By Mark Piggott.

As part of an obsession with digitising aspects of my life I’ve been scanning old photos. There’s something rather satisfying about scanning: the whirring sound and flash of lightning, the appearance on your laptop of those images from the past so that they’re easily viewed, accessible whenever you choose. The added bonus being they’re easily hidden, in secret folders in the hinterlands of your hard drive, if (for example) they’re of former lovers, and you’re happily married, and you don’t want too many awkward questions from your kids – “who’s that lady you’re kissing, daddy?”

Most satisfying of all, your photographs seem safe; once pixelated, no longer are these windows on the past vulnerable to fire, fading, photo-eating mites; they become eternal. So when I have writers’ block, or just feel this need to wallow in history, and I’m alone in the house, sometimes I scan, and listen to music from the old days, and become tearful and wonder where it all went right: not so much “if only”; more “what-if?”

Recently I was scanning some pics from a trip I took with two girlfriends round Europe by train in 1988, or rather, one sans hyphen (Jacqui), the other, Debbie, a mere girl-friend. The photos brought back some memories, and confounded some others; but the thing that struck me was how beautiful Debbie was. As I scanned the photos and saw the way Debbie seemed to look at me through the camera, across the years, I began to wonder: what if Debbie loved me and I her? Was I in love with the wrong woman all along?

Oh my god, what have I done?

Italy, September 1988

Groggy and irritable from a long train journey down the zip of Italy I negotiated the narrow streets and chaotic roads of the small port and found Brindisi’s ancient harbour. The ticket office was a one-storey glass shack where I purchased a ticket on the night ferry to Patras, Greece. The fare was more than expected, leaving me short of lira: there were twelve hours till my boat sailed so purchasing bread, tomatoes and beer from a supermarket near a statue to someone I couldn’t place I sat on the stone quay and dangled my feet over soft, silvery water.

I was 21 and in a spin. For several months I’d been seeing Jacqui, a Londoner I’d met at the youth project where I was setting up a magazine in cement-grey Old Street. Jacqui was small, cute and blonde, confident and full of fun, and I wished to know her better. Opposite the office there was a pub called The Leopard in which days ended; the magazine crowd would sit one end, the local kids who played badminton and five-a-side the other. Jacqui and I touched fingers across the bar-stool barricade, a Northside story.

One night Jacqui told me she’d become a youth worker for the summer and to swing a trip to the South of France with some disabled kids, then inter-railing round Europe with her best friend Debbie. Inter-rail was popular in 1988; for a set fee you had more or less unlimited access to Europe’s train network, and as I’d never seen Spain, Italy or Greece I was envious. I was also jealous of Jacqui and Debbie’s friendship, and broke, living in a condemned squat with an odd assortment of friends and a grungy dog; pre-Maastricht Europe seemed a long way off.

Then my great-grandmother’s health deteriorated. I went to see her in Barts, shivering with faint distaste as I bent to kiss her withered cheek. Florence Piggott had lived in a bungalow with neither hot water nor bathroom for most of her 96 years. As a kid I’d be sent round to eat home-made cake that smelled faintly musty, drink cataclysmic tea and listen to the tales of great uncle Edwin.

Edddie liked a pint and a bet and read a great deal, mostly detective novels. Unlike my grandfather, and his other brothers, one of whom died off Greece when his troop-ship was torpedoed, Eddie missed the war and had been a gardener most of his life, so his stories weren’t exactly laced with derring-do, but he told them with sincerity and warmth.

When granny died she left me a thousand pounds. I was working undercover for The Observer (a hospital in the Isle of Wight were doing drug experiments on the unemployed) but they wouldn’t pay out until my story was published and the enterprise allowance didn’t go far; the inheritance was my ticket to Europe. I told Jacqui I’d finish my investigation then travel down to Coulliere to meet her. Jacqui was delighted but was then faced with the unenviable task of telling Debbie the news.

Debbie was another Islington girl, tall, bright and working class, like Jacqui and most of my acquaintances of Irish stock. My mother was from that same background, that pedigree: smoky boozers, folk songs, punch-ups. I felt one step removed, brought up on the Yorkshire moors, and maybe I wanted to return to the roots mum had brutally hacked away.

Before getting off with Jacqui, I’d once arranged to meet Debbie for a drink. She was nominally the poetry editor on our fledgling (and doomed) magazine, and I wanted to be published. I remember racing to Highbury Corner to meet her, but she didn’t show up. When I confronted Debbie about it later she said she’d forgotten, but that was all right, I forgave her, it was easily done.

Craig, my best friend, had followed me to London from Yorkshire and was travelling down to Coulliere with Jacqui and the rest of the group. We walked from the project to Old Street tube to get our photos taken; a bird crapped on Craig’s head as he walked, so his photo was rather dolorous. My photo sported a black eye, testament to a violent streak I found hard to shake. The one-year passports were light brown, flimsy, and cost, if I recall correctly, a pound: the bargain of my life.

As part of my undercover story for The Observer I had to pose as a homeless kid from Manchester sleeping rough. I did this with such conviction – I was born in Manchester and had briefly run away from home; now I used the name I’d used back then, “Liam Walsh” – the doctors refused to allow me to be experimented on as I was deemed too vulnerable. After filing my somewhat neutered story to a patient Adam ‘Newsnight’ Raphael I took a night boat to Dieppe, swigging whiskey like my image of a romantic traveller; washed my face at Gare du Nord then charged across Paris, riding a TGV through vast cities I’d never heard of, their apartment blocks with wooden shutters more civilised, somehow, than those back home.

My train pulled into the pretty Mediterranean town of Coulliere as evening fell. Finding the campsite I bumped into Craig washing carrots at an outdoor sink: we laughed at the spontaneity of it all. Craig showed me where Jacqui and Debbie were camped and I stuck my head through the zip: Jacqui squealed with surprise and excitement (I don’t recall Debbie’s reaction), and soon we were making love in the dunes.

As a trial run for the longer trip ahead, Jacqui, Debbie and I travelled down to Barcelona by train, crossing the border at Port Bou: why is it I still recall standing on that platform, looking along the track, excitement building as on the heat-shimmering horizon I saw the train that would carry us for the first time into Spain?

Pre-Olympic Barcelona was sleazy and fun. Squashing ourselves into a tiny pension on Las Ramblas we went to buy bread and cheese from the market by the old docks. On a stall we asked for cheese in French (none of us had Spanish) and seeing the cheese-wire positioned to cut off a large lump panicked, attempting to explain the slice was too thick for our meagre resources. The stall owner patiently re-positioned the wire and cut off a thin sliver which we washed down with champagne from the bottle in a sunlit morning plaza.

“The girls” (as I patronisingly referred to them) decided I needed civilising and led me to the top of a cathedral shaped like a giant termite’s nest, then to Picasso’s museum, hidden down a dark alley between stone tenements. I was disappointed: where were the melting clocks? Jacqui and Debbie swapped embarrassed glances. That night we drank aperitif in a red light bar as outside, municipal cleaners hosed the streets clean. The establishment was a safe-house, where prostitutes could enjoy a drink unmolested. Drunk, I attempted to sell the girls for ten beers each, which we all agreed was reasonable.

The Barcelona experiment was a success: Debbie thought she might be able to handle sharing a small tent and her best friend with this obnoxious northerner harbouring a dreamy, sensitive soul which burst out at inopportune moments. On the train back to Coulliere we composed a song that would see us through darker times ahead:

“Baguette up the bum… baguette up the bum… everyone likes a, everyone likes a, baguette up the bum…”

I don’t recall how many more days we spent at the campsite with Craig and the rest of the group. I do recall the walk from the site round to the town along a treacherous path, the sea on one side and the cliffs on the other, which would inspire an opening scene in my first novel, Fire Horses; doing our utmost to irritate the right-on youth workers; walking down to the beach in too-tight shorts, body milk-bottle white, football under one arm and ghetto blaster blasting under the other; making love with Jacqui in the sea, inspiring another passage in my first novel, though I don’t recall at this great distance whether it was day or night or whether Debbie was watching from the beach – I hope so.

On our last night in Coulliere, before “the girls” and I headed east and everyone else returned to London, a group of us were out in the town when one of the handicapped girls arrived at our beer garden smiling and shaking her head.

“Oh dear. Oh dear.”

The poor girl had accidentally set fire to the campsite; we rushed back along the treacherous path to find the hillside in flames, the fire brigade hosing down tents. It seemed a good time to move on.

Jacqui, Debbie and I set off by train, eastward this time, and when we awoke to see the sun rise over the Med as we weaved through Marseille and Cannes it seemed anything might be possible. But Milan was cold and stern, too stuck-up for three scruffy backpackers on a miniscule budget, so we took another train to Venice, where we camped on the mainland and took a bus over a long bridge into the submerging city.

The received wisdom is that Venice stinks, but I remember clearly that it didn’t. I also recall the shops selling scary masks, posters of the recent dead plastered on walls, and the ghostly dummies over which carpets were hung, Dante’s shag piles. It was easy to believe they were alive, doomed like the sandwich-boarders of Oxford Street to advertise their wares for eternity.

Cracks were beginning to show: Jacqui and I wished to make love more than was possible under the circumstances (our style well and truly cramped), and to compensate we drank too much. In any case, Jacqui and Debbie wished to see Florence but my money was running out, Italy too expensive, I needed to get to Greece. We agreed to separate. The girls would get their culture fix; I’d find my fantasy doner, my reminder of Archway Kebab.

Leaving a melodramatic poem for Jacqui in the pages of her guide book I took the slow train south. Jacqui and Debbie went to Florence and camped on a steep hillside full of junkies. When Jacqui found my poem (hilariously melodramatic at this distance, naturally, but in which I invested my very soul) she got so drunk she fell down the tent:

DEATH IN VENICE

Pigeons fluster

Yellow chairs cluster

And waiters hover with intent;

As the bombshell drops

The romance stops

and St Mark’s tower is bent.

Desperate passes

Behind dark glasses

You can’t see the pain in my eyes;

Pictures are plastered

On pillar boxes

When someone in Venice dies

(Stick me up)

When I awoke on the rattling train south I was surrounded by ancient Italian women in black dresses staring at me with sour expressions. Pulling myself from my sleeping bag I dug out the last of my bread and tomato and watched the terrain become harsher, hotter. I forget now how many days the journey south took me: I must have changed a few times, maybe in Trieste or Bari, because I recall the smell of ground coffee in the brassy station cafes, the strange ticketing system I couldn’t work out, the knowledge that with every inch I travelled I was going further south and east than ever before, and further away from my love.

Finally I reached Brindisi, bought my ticket, and dangled my legs over that silvery water, sunlight liquefied and reddening my scalp. I don’t recall much about the day but I do remember the book I read from cover to cover, John Irving’s The World According to Garp, which demonstrated that anything is possible in fiction: stories within stories, bears within hotels; beware the undertoad. I loved that book and love it still, though I suppose I’ll never read it again.

Finally I boarded a vast, decrepit ship and that night, as it ploughed south through the Ionian Sea I slept out on deck, lulled by the cool breeze and the waves. I awoke expecting to see the Peloponnese but I’d misread the timetable: the ship didn’t dock until five the next afternoon, and so I spent the day hungry and thirsty, watching the gnarled Albanian coast slip interminably by.

Patras was busy and poor and larger than I’d expected. This scared me; how many cities had I never heard of, each with their bus time tables, radio stations, unwritten rules? Finally I got my doner in a greasy cafe by the bus station (the equivalent of eighty pence for a kebab, fries and large cold beer) then walked out through the town with the intention of sleeping on a beach.

I wrote in my diary:

9.9.88 (Friday) Patras, Greece

People say Patras isn’t Greece, but for me it is more real than the sun-bleached villas of the postcards. Dirty, smelly, run-down, poor, dirty, friendly; being forced to spend a few days there is no bad thing. Having seen nowhere else, this will always be the real Greece to me.

“How did I get here?” I asked myself last night, pulling a rucksack through blocks of flats and hungry children playing ball. “How did I get here?” I asked myself, tired, broke and lonely, as the youths on scooters buzzed past and stared. “How did I get here?” I asked myself as I lay on a pebbled beach in the dark, watching rats scavenge and humans fish, scared that the police might come, or the fishermen. Then a rat jumped on my back, and sleeping on the beach didn’t seem such a good idea after all, not even for the early morning dip. I dressed, packed and was off down the road before you could say “Obstreperous”. Cursing the rats, and tired.

The youth hostel was a big, rambling house on the edge of town, right by the beach, and full of Australian boors. One of my hypocrisies is that although I can be boorish I dislike others who boor - for England or any other country. Disliking the hostel’s culture I wandered around Patras alone, existing on baguettes (singing our little song), cheese, and local whiskey which I mixed up in a cola bottle and swigged on the pebbled beach as street kids held out their palms.

I was missing Jacqui more than I’d hoped. The inter rail card I carried at all times was like a little nativity card on which you rubbed out the days: each day I scratched, finding nothing beneath. On returning to the hostel one night I found a note on my bed: “the girls” had safely arrived. Jacqui and I were reunited, celebrating the fact that in this vast world, with its complicated rules we had yet to understand, we had each found our match in the other.

Jacqui, Debbie and I headed out to Rion Beach, which felt like another world; calm, quiet, a string of restaurants along the beach beneath a string of faltering lights. Our campsite was immaculate, and each morning we’d be woken by a tremendous dawn chorus. One morning I rose before dawn to discover the sound came from a tape the owner had rigged to a PA.

By day we’d sunbathe, at night we’d drink. One night Jacqui and I were trying to make love in the tent when I realised my leg was touching Debbie’s through the sleeping bag. Rather than pull away I let it rest against hers. Mortifyingly, Debbie tossed back her sleeping bag and unzipped the tent, announcing dramatically:

“I’m going to Athens!”

Over a long heart-to-heart outside Jacqui managed to persuade Debbie that we wouldn’t be as tactless again and we all took a ferry to Corfu. On arriving in Corfu Town we were besieged by ancient local women touting accommodation and ended up in a cramped tower block. We got drunk and Debbie took a series of pics of Jacqui and I kissing beneath an umbrella, after which I threw a hub-cap across the busy square and was almost arrested. We decided to head for Benitses, but it was closed so we headed west.

At rugged Paleokastritsa we discovered there was an island-wide transport strike: we were stranded and out of money and pitched our tent on the beach. Jacqui and I decided to visit a bar. Debbie went to the tent and suddenly we heard a scream: when she lay down her head her face had touched something furry. A tense examination with our torch revealed a wild cat. We decided to go out.

There was a tense atmosphere at the local disco: some local youths kept trying to dance with what I saw as my property, my responsibility: my girls. In the end I insisted we leave and head back to the beach. As we walked along a dark lane I saw headlights appear behind us: the youths were following. I turned to Debbie:

“Give me your pen-knife!”

Puzzled, Debbie did as requested. We walked faster, me in the middle, fingering the blunt blade. Jacqui and Debbie were walking along talking, and suddenly I vanished: turning to see where the car was I had plunged down a man-hole. They rushed back to find me looking sheepish; I held out my hand and they howled with laughter. The car drove on.

That night a terrible storm almost blew us all into the sea; next morning we surveyed the wreckage. We had no money, the tent was ruined, we were cold and miserable and with the strike continuing had no way to get off the island. I went swimming: Debbie took a shot, seemingly of the empty sea, but when you zoom in you can see me, hovering above the waves.

A coach pulled up across the road and the girls suggested I go and ask if anyone spoke English. The first person to get off looked oddly familiar, but I’ve always been terrible with names, with faces. He frowned at me, and I at him. Then the girls shouted his name: it was a friend from our youth project in London; a staggering coincidence. More importantly, he had money and didn’t mind lending us some. The four of us got drunk outside some restaurant beneath a pomegranate tree until the strike was broken and we made the port. We left Greece for Italy that night, Jacqui and I making love in a sleeping bag on deck as we listened to gypsies sing and fight. I don’t know where Debbie was.

Southern Italy seemed… repressed. Even though the girls were with a man (i.e., me) passing men whistled appreciatively. The fact Debbie was in very short shorts didn’t help; I kept on at her to change into something more appropriate but she wouldn’t listen. As I wrote in an Observer article published soon after, “Making tracks to Europe”:

At Brindisi we learnt that a national train strike was threatened. We got the last train up the coast to Bari. In the waiting room, an idiot from Enfield was advising two open-mouthed young lady Inter-Railers on which places to avoid: “Don’t go to Venice, its shit, dirty, smelly, full of Italians. And the Greek islands are shit, boring, poor, full of peasants…”Luckily, our night train to Milan was a luxury one. We had a full compartment to ourselves. The seats pull out to form an enormous bed, and we woke up pulling into Milan’s central station.

As we crossed the Swiss border guards entered the train with machine guns to ensure we weren’t smuggling chocolate into this chocolate box nation: the train followed the shore of impossibly pure lakes beneath impossibly tall, clean peaks and an impeccable sky.

Paris: almost home. According to our battered advent calendars our inter rail tickets expired at midnight, we had no money to get to Gare du Nord and we still had to reach the coast, then we bumped into the font of received wisdoms we’d last seen in Bari:

Our friend from Enfield saved the day. He gave us the money to get across Paris, and told us the time of our train- 10.14. We sprinted and caught it with seconds to spare. If it hadn’t been for ‘Arry Enfield we’d have been stuck, down and out in Paris and not London.

London, June 2010

It was that journey around Europe that first gave me some idea as to the size and complexity of the world, giving me a travel bug that ails me to this day. It was probably the only time I was both young, and knew that I was young. It wasn’t so long ago, yet there were these things called lira and franc, drachma and peseta; instead of cybercafés we had post restante; there was no Eurotunnel, just the cold dock at Dieppe. Not long in terms of the universe; but in terms of my life, a distant age, fading memories: fading pictures.

Apparently photos don’t become immortal once you’ve turned them into pixels; even the best CD-Rom lasts only a few years. So it’s a good job I’ve kept the originals safe, and locked away, behind my wardrobe, where the kids can’t find them.

Anyway, the photos don’t match my memory. In one photo “the girls” are dressed up for a night out, this in Greece; they’re wearing glamorous dresses. How did they manage that, living in a tent? Then later we’re at a restaurant table and between me and Debbie (wiping her mouth, eyes sparkling with Metaxa) there are loads of bottles and courses. Maybe we weren’t quite as poor as I recall? Jacqui looks as beautiful as I remember, and Debbie’s eyes are soulful and deep, but the thing that surprises me most is that in most of the photos, all three of us look happy; even Debbie. What was that expression in her eyes?

Jacqui and I moved in together for a year or two, then separated but kept coming back to inflict vast (but not untold) damage on each another. One evening when drunk I bumped into Debbie in Upper Street; we went for a drink and I told her I loved her, had done since she didn’t show up for that date. The fact that had been at The Cock and we were now in the Hope & Anchor just a few yards away seemed like fate: we had finally been brought together!

Sadly, Debbie was displeased by my declaration and left. Jacqui was even less pleased when she heard the exciting news. Then, by one of those mad coincidences that almost make me religious Debbie was allocated a housing association flat directly above mine in a large Clerkenwell block. We’d meet on the communal stairs and smile politely; at night sometimes I’d hear her walk across my ceiling, and sometimes when I lay on my bed and she on hers just ten feet above I could practically hear her breathe.

Debbie became Mike Leigh’s house-keeper, and told him about this bizarre twist of fate, the angry young Manc in the flat below. Then out came the film Naked, with its angry, psychotic central character, and Deb and I joked it was partly about me, though David Thewlis might have something to say about that.

With Craig I still had the travel bug; we decided to go round the world, beginning in Delhi. The night before we left we went for a drink and bumped into Jacqui and Debbie at the Angel. Jacqui and I went back to her new flat. I woke early, in her arms, and wasn’t sure what to do: fly away or stay here, make a life with her? Jacqui walked me to the entrance of the flats on York Way; we hugged goodbye in the grey dawn light and I went home to find Craig waiting, bag packed:

“I didn’t think you were coming,” he said. I grinned.

“There’s nothing to keep me here, is there?”

Through the nineties I continued to drink, and to wallow, and to find strange patterns where perhaps they didn’t exist; my great-gran was called Florence, and her son, my grandfather’s brother, died off the Peloponnese when the Germans torpedoed his ship; we then discovered his name, Vincent, is on a memorial in Athens, unknown and thus unvisited by any of the family in almost seventy years.

Late one night, Jacqui called me out of the blue. She was upstairs, minding Debbie’s flat: would I like to come up for a drink? We talked, and drank all Debbie’s booze, and fell into bed, and something wonderful happened: we didn’t make love. Instead we held each other and cried for what had been and what might have been. So no, I didn’t love the wrong woman, and the wrong woman didn’t love me: my relationship with Jacqui was a product of our lives and times which is why it was fun while it lasted but ultimately doomed.

Even more recently Jacqui and I became Facebook friends, but it sort of fizzled out.

I won’t look at those photos any more; the hard copies will fade, the folder lost in some careless cut/paste accident, and in any case, the camera tells too many truths that don’t match my fantasies. I’d rather read my diaries: a word can paint a thousand pictures. In fact, the only time I really remember that trip is when I dip a toe in the cold ocean. That’s when the memories - real and false, good and bad, all valid at this great distance – at least for me - flood back as I warn my children:

“Beware the undertoad…”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Piggott’s new novel Out of Office (Legend Press) is out now. Fire Horses was published in 2008. He has also had stories and poems published at places including Frank Mask, 433, Outside Left, Bewilderbliss, Aesthetica, PulpBooks, and Open Wide Magazine, as well as features published in the Times, Guardian, Independent, Telegraph; researched for TV shows including Network First and World in Action; and once presented hip Channel 4 show Network 7 — live from Finsbury Park.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Monday, October 4th, 2010.