Working Stiff Read online

  As a teen, I’d only go to London to see my favorite bands play, a bittersweet experience. Skid Row at London Docklands Arena, Def Leppard at Earls Court. Heavy metal fans were a rare and unpopular breed of teenager in our town. I had an overwhelming feeling of fraternity as my long-haired and much put upon chums and I drew closer to the venue, the number of virginal, acne-ridden, problem-haired, studded-leather-jacket-wearing brethren growing thicker and more vociferous on the streets. In the leafy commuter villages of semirural England we metal heads scuttled around in the shadows, trying to avoid the thorough beatings our getups so clearly invited. Here in London, far out of arm’s reach and earshot of the incensed local “trendies,” we strode triumphantly, singing “Youth Gone Wild” at the top of our lungs. In reality, the youth, as wild as we were, had to get back to Fenchurch Street station by 10:56, when the last train to Essex carried us home, drunk, deafened, and temporarily vindicated. The race back home often meant that we had to leave a show halfway through the encore, the strains of our favorite band’s greatest hit singles still playing as we made a desperate drunken dash for the tube.

  I saw London, and by association any big city, as a big, pulsing, offensively cool, sexual, scary hassle that served only to highlight my virginity, provinciality, and lack of savvy. As I sat there with Mrs. Montague and my mother, I sort of couldn’t believe that I would be actually living in the belly of the beast. But Hanwell, in reality, was far from the belly of the beast. Sure it had a metropolitan postal code and was crisscrossed by red double-deckers, but it was too far west to have any urban cred whatsoever.

  MRS. MONTAGUE had an abnormally jowly and wrinkly face; in the telling daylight it appeared positively scrotal. I could only count four tombstone teeth on the top of her mouth. A rare wide smile exposed two large gaps on either side of them. She was taller and thinner than most old ladies, although she was always bent at the hip, ensuring her precise height remained shrouded in mystery. Mrs. Montague gave us a quick tour of what would be my room, as well as the kitchen and bathroom we would share. My room was pokey, eight feet by six and a half, only room for a narrow little bed and quite dim, the ground being level with the windowsill. The bathroom contained a tub but no shower. I also couldn’t help noticing a threadbare toothbrush whose handle was in the shape of a naked man with an erect penis. The kitchen was painted a weak yellow and boasted thick, dusty cobwebs wherever possible.

  The whole afternoon was just a formality; I knew that Mrs. Montague’s pad would be perfect for my plan to waste precisely the right amount of my parents’ time and money.

  The following week, as my parents drove off home after delivering me and my personal effects to Golden Court, I started to wonder why they didn’t once ask me if I was sure that I’d be okay living with some wild-eyed old bat. They thought either that living with a relic would be somehow character-building, were agreeable with her bargain asking price, or had gotten wind of my ill-fated plan and were fixing on teaching me a lesson of my own.

  My going to college garnered me only pity from my school chums, who couldn’t fathom why I had agreed, albeit under duress, to go. They wanted fast cars, sharp clothes, booze-fueled vacations in warm climates, and, a couple of years down the road, enough for a down payment on a house in or around Corringham. Uni would just be putting that all off for another three or four years, slowing down the fags and booze-fueled march to a plot in a local cemetery.

  My farewell drinks do at the White Lion Pub was more like a wake.

  “Well, looking on the bright side,” said John, who, despite being two years younger than me, was already pulling down a good salary at the Bank of England, “you might actually get your balls wet, for once.”

  My friends were always riding me about my status as a sexual nonstarter. Every Friday night a group of four or five of us would drive to some obnoxious super-club to “pull birds.” John, Martin, John, Matt, and the other John would invariably snog a handful of birds and probably get their hands in their knickers on the dance floor, a maneuver we called feeding the pony a sugarlump. I, on the other hand, ended up as the designated eunuch. I would have loved and appreciated an anonymous tug-job in the parking lot of the Pizzazz! nightclub. It seemed that normal sexual experiences like that were being doled out willy-nilly to my crew, while the only visceral pleasure I could count on was rounding out the night with a gyro from Memet’s Abra-kebabra.

  If any of us could have benefited from three years of undergraduate bacchanalia, it was probably me.

  I’LL BE ASKING you to make yourself scarce every second Wednesday,” said Mrs. Montague with what I was beginning to realize was a permanent phlegmy rattle.

  She watched me stack cans of baked beans and pasta onto my end table, windowsill, and under my bed.

  I was told that all of the real estate in the refrigerator was accounted for and that I should also stick to “nonperishables” that I could store in my room.

  “You can stay in your room on these occasions if you’ve nowhere to go but you may not use the bathroom, as movement can be distracting.”

  She went into the other room to watch the omnibus Sunday screening of EastEnders but carried on talking to me in her haughty, horsey tone. “On those occasions, you ought not to drink a lot of fluids. Bridge tournaments, don’t you know. Distractions. We have our home games here. We play Putney next week. Putney! They are awfully good but oftentimes late.”

  And then, with a drag on her cigarette and a heavy sigh, she added, “To the victors go the spoils, I suppose.”

  She stopped for a long, loud slurp of tea. When it came to imbibing hot fluids, she had this interesting habit of giving her month a running start, beginning a powerful inhalation before she had even lifted her cup from the coffee table.

  “I saw your banjo.”

  She was referring to my Fender Stratocaster.

  “I trust that you won’t be playing it while I’m about. I can hear everything. I’m like a hawk.”

  The theme tune to the UK’s most watched nightly soap opera began, and even from the next room I could feel that Mrs. Montague had been placated.

  “I say,” she shouted from the living room in a softer, sadder tone, “would you care to watch EastEnders with me?”

  And so began a ritual. Mrs. Montague would knock on my door with exactly enough time for the kettle to boil, the tea to steep, before the opening credits finished.

  I always found it interesting how my haughty housemate took such an acute interest in a gritty soap opera about the cockney underclass. I’m sure she saw it as a sociological documentary.

  “Would you credit it?” she cried after an unexpected turn of events, her arms gesticulating wildly. “The gall of the man! I don’t like him at all, Grant. No, not one bit.”

  Most nights, Mrs. Montague ate her supper on her lap whilst watching EastEnders with me. When I went to the kitchen to make the preshow tea, there was often a singular potato, a diminutive piece of fish, and a solitary sprig of broccoli all cooked to death in single-serving-size cookware. Prior to her tucking in, I routinely caught her eyeing me up in my peripheral vision. Content that I was engrossed in what was on TV, she pulled a Pepto Bismol–colored plate from her mouth that harbored two of her four top teeth, and placed it on the telephone table that sat between our two threadbare chairs. It was at this time that the loud rotary-dial phone would typically ring.

  “God’s teeth! Who is calling me at this time?” she screamed.

  This often sent great globs of semi-masticated food flying in my general direction.

  “Four-oh-eight-nine?” she’d answer brusquely, her excellent diction compromised by her temporarily toothless mouth.

  Mrs. Montague was evidently still living in a world where phone numbers were made up of only four digits; 4089 became a sort of code word for my friends from home to allude to my supposed intergenerational-sex-for-affordable-lodgings trade.

  In the rare event that it was somebody worth interrupting her TV program for, she�
�d noisily rattle and click her plate back into place. If it was what she termed a “nonemergency” call she gummily suggested that they call back after “my EastEnders.” If it was for me she’d hand the phone to me and angrily jab her index finger at the screen. If I hadn’t gotten rid of them within the time it took for a slurp of tea, she raised the TV volume until the sound distorted, sending poor Dippy into a feathery squawking panic.

  Over the din she’d yell, “Why on earth they have to call at this time, Dippy, I’ll just never comprehend.”

  At some point within the first few months of my strange new life in west London, I must have decided that I was in no rush to leave Mrs. Montague’s flat or Thames Valley University. The nine hours of classes I was expected to attend per week meant that I enjoyed an amount of leisure time I could have only dreamed of before attending college. The classes I took were fairly eclectic, mainly due to the fact that I selected them purely based on the time they took place. My aim was to try to shoehorn everything into one bumper Wednesday. The rest of the week was spent lying in bed and puttering about the flat with my ancient housemate.

  I grew to like and admire Mrs. Montague immensely and few were the times that I rued missing the opportunity to shack up with three or four snot-nosed northerners in a damp basement flat closer to campus for three times the price. How I got to TVU and how I lived once I arrived made me feel that I was separate from almost everyone else I met there. I felt like I’d fallen asleep and woken up in somebody else’s life, and quite inexplicably I had just gotten on with it. It was the first time in my life that I’d really taken a step out of my comfort zone as well as breaking formation with my own peer group, and I began to find the feeling of being somewhere or doing something I wasn’t destined to do somewhat exhilarating. At university, I felt that I infiltrated a whole strange genus of human beings who wanted to learn, grow, aspire to lead interesting, satisfying lives, go on cycling vacations through the south of France, eat salad with every meal out of little wooden bowls, watch less television, read more books, read the Guardian, expose themselves to interesting cinema, stage an intervention when they saw a parent smacking his or her child on the street. I would return back to Essex to see the boys at the weekend and noticed myself cringing as everyone else happily watched someone be kicked and punched motionless in a nightclub car park.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but through osmosis I must have started to adopt a new mind-set.

  At university, there was certainly no one from my part of the world to relate to. In fact, Scousers, Geordies, Mancs, Toffs, Taffs, Brummies, and Slones all found common ground in swapping tired Essex jokes in my presence, asking me what the correct rhyming slang for this or that was, making fun of the way that I spoke! Up until I left for college I was told on an almost daily basis how “properly” I spoke.

  “What time are you off to college in the morning?” said Mrs. Montague whenever I retired to my bedroom after an evening’s television feast or political debate.

  If I told her that I had a class that started before noon she would dramatically place both hands on her head and exclaim, “By Christ, that’s the middle of the night! Leave quietly or on your own head be it.”

  In the colder months she’d request that if I was going to be out early would I mind scraping the ice from the windscreen of her crapped-out Ford Fiesta. Given the pittance that she was charging me in rent, I could hardly say no. To be honest, I rather liked doing things like that for her. On the few occasions I did catch her up before noon she cut a striking figure with her red silk kimono and wild unbrushed hair. For the first ninety minutes of consciousness, the skin of her face seemed to lack any elasticity whatsoever and her features just tended to dangle, swaying to and fro in the morning sunlight. After a few cups of tea she could make enough basic sounds to let me know what on earth she was doing up before the crack of noon.

  “I’m having a man in,” she’d whisper, defeated, pointing to yet another appliance that she’d completely reduced to a pile of screws and transistors. On an almost weekly basis, Mrs. Montague would become convinced that some other household item was “on the blink” and ruthlessly take it to bits.

  With a screwdriver and fifteen minutes of spare time, the woman was a menace.

  Every once in a while she’d inform me that she was “having a soak” and that I should “attend to any urgent business sooner rather than later.”

  I soon noticed that, at bath times, my roommate was walking into the bathroom with a bundle of clothes. It seemed that Mrs. Montague would bathe and wash her clothes in one fell swoop, her loud splish-splashing in the tub a bid to re-create the motions of a washing machine. The only question that remained was whether she was washing her clothes in bath oils or was bathing in detergent. I tended to suspect the latter as her skin did appear considerably tauter after she emerged, though neither she nor her polyester garments seemed any cleaner after an hour-long bath. With no dryer, she hung the clothes over three taught lengths of thin white rope above the tub. Bathing meant worrying about gravity getting the better of Mrs. Montague’s dripping drawstring bloomers and then depositing them on my face should I dare to close my eyes for the briefest of moments.

  MRS. MONTAGUE was a personification of the demise of the British Empire. Born just after its zenith, she enjoyed a privileged childhood spent in India, then dubbed the “Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire.” In Hanwell, W7, she lived a mile away from Southall, the highest concentration of Indians in the world outside of New Delhi. But it was the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis living in the neighborhood that proved more irksome for her. Around one particular religious holiday in which fireworks were let off, she would gaze mournfully out the window, shaking her head as rockets lit up the sky.

  “I wish those ruddy wogs would shut up, don’t you, Grant?” she said as a Roman candle exploded in great blooms of magenta.

  I hated it when she asked me a question like that in regards to ethnic minorities, but just didn’t have the chutzpah to tell her that she was a crotchety old racist. I often met her halfway.

  “I suppose they are being a bit noisy. Getting their revenge for Guy Fawkes Night, I expect.”

  “Wogs,” she said gently under her breath.

  I began to think that the old woman I lived with had lost her marbles, but it became increasingly clear that Mrs. Montague simply didn’t give a shit anymore. The senior ladies I’d ever met had been cheery, house proud, clean, early to bed and early to rise, tolerant and sweet to a fault. These suburban old dears that I’d grown up knowing seemed lobotomized compared to Mrs. Montague, who was becoming noticeably more militant by the day.

  A few days after commencing classes I returned home to the flat to see Mrs. Montague surrounded by the innards of yet another electrical appliance that she’d decided to vivisect in order to find the omnipresent “blasted squeaking noise” that could usually be attributed to Dippy.

  “I shall have to have a man look at this,” she said. She put the screwdriver down and picked a cigarette up. I knew that she didn’t mean me.

  “What’s that? One of your textbooks?” she said and nodded to the thick hardback I had tucked under my arm.

  In retrospect the correct answer would have been a simple yes.

  “No, a Hare Krishna man made me buy it for ten pounds,” I said.

  “Pardon me?” she screamed with so much gusto that poor Dippy flew into a feathery conniption.

  “I mean, he didn’t forcibly make me buy it, but he said I really should read it.”

  My first few months at university were extremely lonely, mostly because I’d chosen to live with a geriatric, almost three miles away from campus, which precluded me from what little university life was on offer at TVU, and I spent my long weekends back in Essex. I was feeling a bit depressed for the first time. The shaven-headed gentleman in the orange robes on Ealing Broadway was very friendly seeming when he jumped into my path and started firing off questions, quickly convincing me that he was
interested in the answers I had to offer. He was both a figurative and literal splash of color in a time period that was awfully gray seeming. Pretty soon he’d swung the conversation around to the huge box of books he had nearby, but he didn’t do it in a way that seemed at all mercenary. The book, he promised me, was full of answers to finding happiness and enlightenment that were possibly less chafing than my own methods. At that moment it seemed to be just what I needed. Before you could say country cousin, I had made my purchase, finding that suddenly my grinning friend was immediately less interested in continuing our chat.

  “Where are my keys?” said Mrs. Montague. “This is a bloody liberty, you’ve come up from the country and you are being ripped off. This is something I shan’t stand for, by Gum.”

  She shucked herself into her decades-old Marks & Spencer Windbreaker and continued the hunt for the keys.

  “Where are you going?” I said. I was worried by her furrowed brow and the ferocity with which she sucked on her cigarette.

  “We’re going to get your ten bloody pounds back. We’re going to teach him a lesson! Shame on him for taking your father’s money. You’ve just come up from the country.”

  I felt grateful that my elderly landlady had my father’s finances at heart, annoyed that she had outed me as a bumpkin, and fearful for whatever she was about to inflict on the unwitting Hare Krishna.

  “Please, no!” I cried, doing everything to demonstrate my horror at her guerrilla methods besides physically restraining her as more feathers spewed from poor Dippy’s cage.