The Alternative Hero (24 page)

Cynics also trumpeted that Vladivostok was one of the cheapest places in the world to buy heroin—but who really knew the truth. By the end of 1996, the question, “Where the fuck is Gloria Feathers?”—rather like, “Whatever happened to the fat bloke who introduced Carter USM?” or even, “Is the singer from Placebo a boy or a girl?”—seemed to be a question only losers would ask.

But the mystery remains. And there are still some losers out there who intend to solve it.

I press save, and shut the creaking lid of the almighty laptop. The dark grey laptop I bought in 1997, when I inherited a grand from that great-aunt who met her end in a nursing home in Leighton Buzzard; the laptop that had seemed so slick and ultramodern back then with its groovy navigation keys and Windows 95, but now looks as ancient as my mum’s typewriter when side by side with Polly’s spanking Mac on the kitchen table. I’ve ridden it hard, like a faithful old workhorse (does one ride a workhorse?)—I’ve had parts replaced, upgraded the memory and processor two or three times, dropped it down umpteen flights of steps, allowed friends to skin up on it, almost set fire to it (it has no power switch thanks to this particular incident), spilled tea on it, nearly lost it completely when Heathrow decided to send it to Frankfurt while I was on the way to Copenhagen—but it still works. Granted, it takes two or three minutes to open up a Word document, and navigating to certain Web pages is often an excuse to pop out for another can of beer, but it’s
been a reliable old thing and I’ll be quite sad to see it go. I say that as if I’ve got a spare eight hundred quid for a new one, which as you’ve probably figured is something of an untruth, but I imagine it’ll happen one day when I get a windfall or it finally kicks the bucket and goes to the big IT department in the sky.

Like a shirking schoolboy, I’ve been studiously avoiding what I’m meant to be doing. It’s now eleven o’clock at night, but the frantic scribbling of likely-looking plot outlines, sample chapters and character explorations for the alleged novel I’m supposed to show Mr. Webster tomorrow afternoon has not yet commenced. You may wonder what the arse I’ve been doing for the last twenty-four hours. Funny, I’ve been thinking the same.

You see, being unemployed is not simply a situation one puts up with for a while. It’s actually a full-time job in itself; a wholly absorbing occupation that commences the second you leave the building of your outgoing employer and doesn’t stop until you arrive at the door of your next, however many days, weeks, months or years that takes. There is never, in my fairly comprehensive experience, a period of grace when one cheerfully thinks, “Ooh, I’ll catch up on my reading/tidy my papers/go to a museum/learn to make curry/take advantage of the cheap afternoon cinema tickets,” etc. From minute number one there is a massive, ugly, concrete prehistoric mammoth of guilt and worry standing in the useful bit of whatever room you’re in, trumpeting loudly whenever you try to concentrate, butting you with its tusks if you attempt to do something normal like have sex or eat in a restaurant. A small number of unemployed people—chiefly dependent on their bank balance and/or mental state—manage to give the mammoth its marching orders at five thirty every day and at weekends, enabling them to coexist with partners and friends in a relatively civil and functional manner until nine o’clock the following
morning; but alas, the majority continue to mope around like grumpy, directionless dickheads until they’re either too drunk to care or asleep. You can guess which group I belong to.

That said, a few hours spent on the life of Gloria Feathers is hardly time wasted, and will be handy for my eventual masterpiece. Even Alan might give it a quick read. He went through a period of unnatural obsession with Gloria; oddly, it was long after what might be described as her “heyday,” by which point she looked extra emaciated and white as a Tudor. Alan, nearing the end of a degree at Manchester University, had heard the song “4st 7lb” from the Manics’
Holy Bible
, decided Gloria was anorexic (he wasn’t entirely alone in this opinion) and made it his mission to “save” her, as recounted in this charming scrapbook entry:

It cuts off just like that. I remember my university years being peppered with these late-night phone calls from Alan, which became more drunken at both ends of the line as the years went by and our student debts soared. The discussions usually involved either a band he’d just seen and felt the need to gush or rant about (Miranda Sex Garden and Suede, respectively, seem to stand out in my memory), or a girl he’d just been wounded by. “
Why
won’t she go out with me, man?” he’d whimper, while I’d try to work out which one of the many he’d recently mentioned had spurned him and why I was suddenly considered an expert. I’m straining to remember the contents of that specific night’s discussion, shivering as I probably was in one of the long corridors of my hall of residence near Marylebone, hanging on the incoming-calls-only intercollegiate phone, wearing my boxer shorts and Power of Dreams “100 Ways to Kill a Love” T-shirt (I kept my rarest shirts for pretend-nonchalant use around the hall in the hope that some girl would notice). It was around this time I turned down the job at the
NME
(oh yes) so maybe we were talking about that, in between bouts of Alan’s ongoing Gloria-related misery and Mad Dog-fuelled blethering.

I place Alan’s fragile scrapbook carefully on my desk and make the usual trip past Polly’s bedroom (she’s in there with someone, judging by the wrestling noises) towards the kitchen in general and the fridge in particular, where I find my habitual can of liquid refreshment. I hold the funny, cold metal tube in front of my eyes for a moment, pondering its ingredients and precisely how I’ll benefit from them. Looking at it logically, I’m not drunk, nor do I need to be,
but there’s the general buzz of half a dozen units of alcohol inside me; if I increase that buzz, is it
really
likely do anything for the creativity which must occur at some point between now and 3 p.m. tomorrow? It’s doubtful. I’m thirsty but there’s water in the tap, tea or coffee in the cupboard, milk in the fridge, even some orange juice. I could have any or all of these things. Polly, in a fit of health consciousness, has even bought some echinacea tea, which I also could sample.

I stop being so silly and crack open the beer.

Returning to my room, I decide—inspiration now being somewhat thin on the ground—to take a look in my Important Box. This is a wooden chest I inherited from a university friend who’d been at boarding school, in which I have stored my most valuable and noteworthy items: my passport and birth certificate, my twenty-first-birthday cuff links, my signed copy of
Casual Sex in the Cineplex
by The Sultans of Ping FC, my university dissertation (some rambling bollocks about Arthur Miller), my letter from Stephen Fry (“I am delighted you so hugely enjoyed
The Hippopotamus”)
, my Letter of the Week in
Melody Maker
(“You are an important and usually excellent newspaper; STOP abusing your position!”), other assorted paraphernalia and some of the more superior copies
of Vorsprung Durch Peanut
and its Britpop-era successor,
Definitely Not
. Although I’m supposed to be writing about anything but music, I can’t resist a quick leaf through these. The first issue that reaches my hand is from autumn 1991, by which time the
Peanut
had evolved from a bedroom concern to a bedroom concern with slightly faultier equipment (I’d managed to buy one of my ex-school’s old photocopiers at a knockdown price). It primarily consists of a report on the “Great Summer Indiethon”—an insane, forty-two-band slog designed to take in various Reading Festival warm-up gigs, in-store performances, the festival itself and, coincidentally, the secret Thieving
Magpies appearance before which Alan and I thrashed those two roadies of theirs at pool in the pub next door to the venue. Throughout, we’re referred to by our fanzine nicknames, Clive Pop and Anal Alan; there’s a cast of other occasionals (including Alan’s university chums Steve the Swede and Emily from East Anglia), loads of banter, in-joking and far less cider than one might imagine. Reading Thursday of that year was my eighteenth birthday, in fact.

A happy memory.

Now, I’m not normally the kind of bloke who mopes around wondering where it all went turnip-shaped, but there’s an irony to all of this that’s making me wince. Unless the rose-tinted specs are messing with me, it goes something like this—eighteen: contented, not a lot to worry about except how much indie the human body can physically absorb, indulging in cheeky snogs and fumbles with whichever female permits it, my weakness for alcohol still in its infancy, trouncing two hardy, dreadlocked Thieving Magpie roadies at pool. Fast-forward to thirty-three: frustrated, no job, next-to-zero money, recovering from a six-year relationship which probably lasted five years too long, my weakness for alcohol well into its senility, being scolded by two hardy, shorn-headed, former Thieving Magpie roadies for writing foolish, bunny-boiling letters to an ex-alternative superstar. I wouldn’t say things were improving with age, would you?

And yet, they tell me to grow up.

All right, so I’ve had a few drinks and Thursday is rapidly turning into Friday, but I’m deathly serious: how many problems, arguments, insecurities, guilt complexes and overdrafts are a direct result of this “growing up”? The demon adulthood, and what’s expected of you, or what you expect of it?

“Grow up,” they say. My ex-girlfriend said it. Alan says it. My mum says it. My sister once said it (then my five-year-old nephew repeated
it all afternoon). My bank manager says it, albeit in a style owing slightly more to interest rates and loan top-up policies than models of emotional development. Geoffrey “Lance” Webster says it; for what was the sending round of his pair of amplifier-lugging stooges, if not a big, unwashed crustie fist with the words “GROW UP” tattooed in that hideous, faded greeny-blue colour? And now even fucking Polly—Polly the neurotic, nymphomaniac disaster, who somehow manages to hold down a legal job in between crazed nights of mainlining red wine, tying pizza-delivery men to her bed and getting taxis from London to Bristol, Polly who can’t even sit still through a film at the cinema without nipping out for a fag and a gin and tonic—
she
has decided to start saying it. Why? Why are all these people trying to convince me that life would somehow improve if I started behaving like a textbook version of a thirty-three-year-old?

For my small amount of money anyway, most people on this paltry little island are actually trying to be
younger
, at least cosmetically speaking. Or
feel
younger. They want the body, face, libido and spontaneous spirit of a twenty-year-old, welded seamlessly onto the carcass of an individual with a forty-year-old’s level of experience, discipline and knowledge of the property market. I spend a substantial amount of my time trying to squeeze forth the tiniest drop of enthusiasm for any of that stuff. But in truth, I’d rather drink dishwater than glance in an estate agent’s window; would sooner chat to a dead pigeon than with someone who’s about to renovate their loft.

I find it fascinating, this differing view of “growing up.” For me, it was nothing more than the process of becoming physically larger, less interested in getting extra track for my Scalextric and more interested in what lay behind women’s clothing. Maybe I’m deeply lacking something, but that was pretty much it; apart from being able to buy certain items and go to certain places without pretending
to be Billy Flushing’s elder brother. From then on, the improvements of aging ceased. My first eighteen years were spent looking forward to the age of eighteen, while—if I call upon the sort of brutal honesty only five cans of lager can summon—the last fifteen have basically consisted of looking back.