Goodbye Cally Road

Chapter Thirty-Six: Goodbye Cally Road

It was 1986, and everything in our world was wobbling at once.

They say if it ain’t one thing, then it’s another, don’t they?

No sooner had the old man got himself sorted, it was Nigel’s turn to act up.

He’d been seeing a girl called Kay for a while since moving to Croydon, and had actually started to live a little. Going to the pub, going to the cinema with her, generally enjoying himself a bit more, and he was very happy with the way things were going in his life.

He had even left Mum’s house and moved in with Kay and her parents in a house in Southgate, North London.

Things all looking rosy then, eh?

Not quite.

They had a holiday to France all booked and paid for, which Nigel was really looking forward to, and also a trip to Jersey with his best mate Mark Deacon.

The events I’m about to describe happened within about six months of each other and were to lead to his almost utter downfall and destruction.

Firstly, and quite unexpectedly, Kay dumped Nigel. Very unceremoniously, by phone at work.

Just like that.

A real, "Do one, and your stuff is on the doorstep" kind of phone call.

The truth is she hated his heavy drinking, the fact you could never get a proper conversation out of him, never being entirely sure he'd be where he said he was going to be, and so on.

Her parents hated him as well, so that didn’t help.

And the time she confided in me that he’d pissed the bed they were sharing once was pretty much the final straw.

I went with him that night to Southgate to collect his things, and she wouldn’t even talk to him at the front door.

It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen.

Nigel walking down the road with a black bin liner full of clothes, sobbing his heart out for everyone to see.

He got absolutely smashed on a bottle of vodka on the Underground train from Southgate back to the Caledonian Road.

So much so that I had to support his weight and hold him up for most of the way down the Cally to Dad’s bedsit, which is where he was going to stay that night.

When we got there, we laid him on the sofa on his side and let him sleep it off.

As I was leaving, I asked Dad if he’d be all right with Nigel being so pissed.

He just gave me a massively over-the-top sarcastic smile and said,

"You prick."

The next day neither Nigel nor Dad was anywhere to be seen.

By about half-past ten, Nigel’s boss popped over asking where he was because he hadn’t shown up for work that morning.

Surprise, surprise.

I told him we’d had a Chinese the night before and both felt really ropey on the way home.

No drink involved whatsoever, guvnor.

I don’t think he believed me, but that was my story and I was sticking to it.

Anyway, long story short, Nigel and Dad had taken the money Nigel had saved and gone on a massive bender.

I saw them that night and neither of them could string a sentence together.

Nor would they while they were in that black mood and drinking like mad.

I went into Nigel’s shop the next day and explained that he was most unwell and would be off for at least the rest of the week.

The boss wasn’t happy about it, but what could he do?

Sitting with those two, or going out every night with them, was starting to get on my nerves a bit, to be honest.

It was 1986 and I’d started feeling that something was missing in my life.

Night after night of pub, club, takeaway, bed, repeat, was not what I was looking for.

I started feeling a massive compunction to leave the Cally and do something else with myself.

That’s all very well to say, but doing it was something else entirely.

It’s not that I had a plan, or any particular way I wanted my life to go.

I just felt there was more for me than this.

The problem was that the money Manny paid me was far better than I was likely to get anywhere else.

Around that time, I started hanging around more in Wood Green with the mates I’d left behind when I went into care.

They all still lived there and seemed to be doing more with themselves than me or Nigel.

After a short while, my good mates Mark and Ange asked if I’d like to lodge with them.

So I upped sticks and moved one night.

Leaving my little bedsit palace.

Swapping four walls and a window with a cool view over the train tracks for a sofa bed in a dining room, a meal at night, a telly to settle down in front of, and some company that wasn’t pissed all the time.

Don’t get the wrong idea about the place though.

Although it was basically sound and safe, and a legitimate council flat rented the proper way, it was still Wood Green.

It was still a den of drink and drugs.

And chaos still ruled supreme.

But only sometimes.

Mark and Ange were good people.

People I’d known since I was ten or eleven years old.

Back then they were like family to me.

One afternoon, while Manny was on one of his stock-smashing exercises, he marked a nice little television for death.

He used to do that.

Go through everything in the shop and decide what was getting executed.

If it hadn’t sold by close of business that day, I was to smash the living shit out of it, leave it outside, and one of the dust crews would pick it up in the morning.

Anyway, instead of smashing the telly, I put it gently on the floor.

When Manny left for the night, I carried it round to Dad’s place.

To say the old man was chuffed with it would be the understatement of the century.

It was literally the highlight of his year.

The first time we plugged it in, we got a picture straight away.

And for what was basically a second or third-hand old-fashioned piece of shit with a coat hanger jammed in the aerial socket, it gave an amazing picture and made an old sick man extremely happy.

To be honest, it made me very happy too.

Going round to Dad’s bedsit after work with a few beers was some of the best time we ever spent together.

I’d watch Blockbusters, Countdown, or whatever happened to be on around teatime before heading back to Wood Green for the night.

Funnily enough, his two favourite programmes were Danger Mouse and Countdown.

That still makes me smile to this day.

A fucking nutter like him, drinking beer and chuckling away at Danger Mouse.

The world was not all good with Nigel though.

He was slipping more and more into depression, and people were starting to notice.

To me, Nigel was going exactly the same way our dad had gone before him. Nothing seemed to matter anymore except where his next drink was coming from.

One Saturday afternoon he told me he was going to Croydon to surprise Mum and maybe see if he could move back in with her and Graham. He left me her phone number in case she said yes and I needed to contact him.

I don’t know what came over me that night, but out of the blue I had an overwhelming urge to use the phone number Nigel had given me and talk to Mother.

I left the bar of the Edinburgh Castle and crossed the road to the phone box. The very same one next to the bus stop where Dad had knocked the life out of that poor bloke I told you about when I was a kid.

I dialled the number on the scrap of paper in my hand and, after a short while, Mum picked up.

It was such an odd phone call.

I’ll never forget it.

She spoke as though we’d never had an argument in our lives. She didn’t even mention the fact that she’d fucked off and left me behind when she moved to Croydon.

Talk about out of sight, out of mind.

I knew exactly what she was doing straight away. The same old shit she used to do with my teachers and social workers. Only this time, because it was me, she wasn’t bothering with the stupid posh accent.

I decided to go along with it and see where it went.

After all, what did I have to lose?

We chatted for a few minutes and, when I asked if she was surprised to see Nigel, she said,

"Oh, very surprised. When I answered the door, he just stood there, wet his jeans right in front of me, and then collapsed."

I won’t lie to you...

I absolutely laughed my head off.

I hadn’t had a belly roar like that since Manny moved a wardrobe and the top half of it crashed down on his head.

I’d seen Nigel do the same sort of thing many, many times, so it came as no shock to me.

Back when we were a couple of vulnerable kids, she was never there to see the state Nigel could get into, or even imagine how low he could stoop when drink had hold of him.

No.

It was me who looked after him.

Me who sat through those long nights while she was out gallivanting, pissing it up with any number of men when she should have been at home looking after her two little boys.

She told me she would be taking Nigel in because he was in such a state.

Over the next few weeks, Nigel’s drinking and general depression led him into all sorts of trouble.

One night, staggering home from the Cally drunk yet again, he got himself bashed up by someone and never made it into work the next day.

Eventually, one thing led to another and I literally had to take him home to his mummy.

One freezing cold Saturday night I carried him on my shoulders for the last half mile or so from West Croydon Station to Graham’s house.

All the thanks I got was him dribbling down my back.

Charming, I know.

The house on Wellington Road, Croydon, was quite a large affair. Each room had been converted into a bedsit for one or two people to share.

Graham had owned it long before he met my mum and had let it out to five or six tenants when he moved in with us in Wood Green.

It was a dark and depressing place.

Every room badly needed a clean-up and a lick of paint.

Nigel’s room was right at the back of the house on the first floor.

I somehow managed to get him up the stairs and onto his bed, dumping him there rather unceremoniously.

To be fair, after the nightmare he’d given me that afternoon, he was lucky to get that much out of me.

So anyway, once I’d dragged myself back downstairs, it was time for the inevitable meeting with the powers of darkness.

Or, as I called them back then, Mum and Graham.

Graham was the easy part.

He looked at me for a second, said, "Hello there," and then turned straight back to the television without even waiting for a reply.

Mother was another story altogether.

She jumped up, led me into the kitchen, made me a cup of tea and immediately started firing questions at me.

How had I been?

Where was I living?

What was I up to?

Did I have a girlfriend?

I suppose I could have told her to mind her own business and called her a nosey spastic.

And I probably would have been right to do so.

But what would have been the point?

My two years at Bradfield House had taught me good manners.

Why stoop to her level?

This is the point in my story where I might tell you that she sat me down and gave me a plate of goulash just like Mamma used to make when I was a child.

But of course not.

She never fed me a fucking thing when I was little, so why start now?

Besides, she wouldn’t have known where to begin cooking unless it came frozen or out of a tin.

And I was in no mood for a Fray Bentos pie or some half-cold, lumpy Smash.

A couple of days later, maybe Tuesday or Wednesday, Nigel once again failed to show up for work.

When he eventually made the trip from Croydon to the Cally Road, he arrived three hours late and drunk.

His boss sacked him.

It was the final straw.

Nigel was having a bad time, granted, but a bloke can only give his employees so much slack.

The thing about Nigel was that he was just so frail of mind.

Any little knock life handed him was almost too much to bear.

And this was a really big one.

Without a job for the first time since leaving school, and nursing his first broken heart, he was completely lost.

He went utterly off the rails.

Drinking with Dad.

Drinking with his best mate Mark Deacon.

Drinking with anyone who would sit still long enough.

It went on for weeks.

Drinking.

Going missing.

Turning up.

Drinking.

Going missing.

Turning up.

Round and round in a never-ending cycle.

Then one day, after work, while I was packing away the shop front, a car pulled up alongside me.

And I nearly fell over.

The biggest shock of my life.

It was Mother.

And Graham.

And they had a proposition for me.

We sat in a café while she launched into one of her epic sob stories which, frankly, I can’t be arsed to go through again.

Anyway, the long and short of it was this.

She wanted me to move to Croydon, live with her and Graham rent free, and look after Nigel.

I hadn’t seen Nigel for a couple of days and I was genuinely worried about him and his state of mind.

So I told her I’d think about it and let her know.

But how was I to know that my life was about to turn upside down in the most marvellous way imaginable?

I was about to embark on a day trip that would change everything.

In the very best way possible.