Monday – I awake to the sound of the music of David Bowie and the distinct smell of bacon. Upon ascending the stairs, I’m stunned to find Bowie himself in my kitchen making bacon sandwiches and singing Oh You Pretty Things.
I thought you were dead, I say.
I was, replies Bowie and then he tells me the most incredible story. He tells me that he has been to both heaven and hell since he shuffled off this mortal coil. Apparently a lot of that religious stuff – the pearly gates, the eternal afterlife, the God hanging around in robes and a big white beard – is all true but it’s all awful. God and his son Jesus are vile, abusive creatures and everyone in heaven is miserable but nobody will do anything about it because God threatens to throw anyone that steps out of line into hell where his old pal Satan will torture them for all eternity. Since being glorified by Christianity, Jesus has become a bloated megalomaniac sex pest trying to get off with anything that moves.
The arrival of Bowie in heaven shook things up. Both God and Jesus felt threatened by his charisma, popularity and general disregard of convention. Bowie spent his early months in heaven carving out a new character – Neville Upstart – which he unleashed to great acclaim. Neville Upstart was viewed by the heavenly authorities as dangerously rebellious and it wasn’t long before God decided to take action. Bowie was cast out of heaven and into the pit of hell, where he was due to burn for all eternity but, luckily for him, Satan’s favourite song of all time is Diamond Dogs so he was spared. Banished from both heaven and hell, Bowie found himself back on earth.
So here I am, I’m afraid. Planet earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do, as they say, Bowie says before adding, Fancy a bacon sarnie?
The bacon sandwich is terrific. While I’m hungrily devouring it, Bowie tells me of his plans to tour his character Neville Upstart as the world’s first posthumous rock superstar but first, he says, he wants to go to Brixton to visit his childhood home and retrieve a book on Alistair Crowley that he buried years ago in the back garden. He invites me to come with him. Great, I say, we can get the Number 2 bus from Norwood Rd.
Don’t be silly, Bowie says, hop on my back.
Turns out that one of the main benefits of being returned to earth after being kicked out of both heaven and hell is that you can fly. We leave my flat and Bowie soars into the sky singing songs from his back catalogue such as Ashes to Ashes, All The Madmen and Sound and Vision. It’s one of the finer moments of my life to date and I tell everyone about it immediately on Facebook.
We crash-land into a fruit and veg stall next to Brixton tube station. Bowie really needs to work on his landings. Amazingly, although the streets are bustling with people as usual, nobody takes any notice. The fruit and veg seller scowls and swears a bit but nothing else.
Look, it’s David Bowie, he’s back!, I say but the guy tells me to bugger off as he picks avocados up from the pavement. I try to grab the attention of a few passers by, pointing at Bowie and saying his name, but it gets no reaction other than puzzled stares. They obviously think it’s a lookalike. Bowie seems delighted.
Great, he says. Anonymity. That feels like a welcome relief after all these years. I can spend a bit of time under the radar.
Bowie then starts talking excitedly about doing various low-key things that he’s never had a chance to try before, like making ice-cream on an urban farm, or becoming a scaffolder, or a lift attendant.
How would you like to be my agent? he asks me. I tell him I’d be honoured and he points to a man selling hot dogs outside the tube station and asks me to enquire about shadowing him for two days a week work experience.
I approach the hot dog seller, introduce him to Bowie and make the proposition but, to my immense surprise, he doesn’t bat an eyelid and just says, Do you want a hot dog or not?
Bowie shrugs off the rejection but I can tell he’s unimpressed with my skills as an agent. I can hear it in his voice, sense it in his body language. His manner towards me has changed. This is confirmed when he points across Brixton Road and gasps, Holy crap, what the hell’s happened to my mural?
I turn to look but can’t see anything unusual going on. When I turn back, Bowie’s gone, taken flight, up in the air, singing Golden Years to himself as he goes.
I get the number 2 bus back home.
Tuesday – I get a nasty surprise first thing this morning. I open my kitchen cupboard to find that my jar of honey is completely empty. Worse still, there is an enormous pile of excrement in the sink.
I knock on the door of my attic cupboard and confront Geert, the Dutch ghost who resides in the cupboard.
Geert, have you had your horrible racist aunt round to stay again? I ask. Geert says no. Dammit. Looks like we’ve had intruders.
My worst fears are confirmed when Lambeth council send a pest control guy round to do an inspection. He takes one look at the crap in the sink and says bears.
Sure enough, further investigation reveals there to be three bears up on the roof – two adults and a cub. They spot us looking at them and start taunting us. One of the adults flicks the V’s at us, the other flashes its arse and the kid bear shouts out fuck off you sad pricks.
Don’t be alarmed, urban bears are very anti-social and sweary, the council guy explains. He tells me I’ve got three options. I can poison them with vodka, I can set bear traps or I can repel them by leaving gabba techno music playing at full volume all through the night.
The gabba techno is a no-no. I don’t really want to waste vodka on cocky bears. I ask the guy what the traps are like. He says they won’t kill the bears, just wound them enough to stop them returning to the flat. I decide that traps are the best option.
Bear traps set, I head off to the Railway Tavern for drinks to celebrate the birthday of my good mate Ralph Wiggler. Then Ralph and I head back to mine to polish off a bottle of whiskey with Lazarus the moth who gets drunk and starts ranting on about David Attenborough being a wanker. Apparently Lazarus has been filmed as part of a forthcoming Attenborough documentary on moths for BBC One and he’s not happy with the final film. It’s been edited to make me look like a prick, he moans.
Lazarus gets too drunk to fly home so I let him sleep on the windowsill. Ralph sleeps over too on the fold-up sofa bed in my lounge. But I forget to warn him about the bear traps and in the middle of the night we are all woken by a loud scream of AAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!
Poor Ralph. He only wanted a drink of water and he’s ended up with his foot clamped in an iron trap. We spend four hours in St George’s A&E before Ralph is taken in for surgery. The surgeons say he’ll lose his foot. What a crazy end to the night. He won’t forget this birthday in a hurry.
I get back home at around 7am. There’s a giant turd on my sofa, a cock and balls sketched out in tomato ketchup on my living room wall and all my milk has gone. Those fucking bears!
Wednesday – Today is a bad day. There’s a short story competition that I want to enter. The first prize is a week away on a secluded writing retreat somewhere on the south coast. The deadline is 5pm today and I’ve cleared a window in my schedules so that I can spend the day getting a corker written, but nothing is coming out. The creative juices have all dried up.
By midday I’m desperate and there’s only one thing I can think of doing. I visit my neighbour three doors down the street, Howlin’ Piers.
Howlin’ Piers is the best goddamn blues musician in the whole of Tulse Hill. But it wasn’t always so. He used to be an absolutely awful blues musician, a stuffy middle-class financial lawyer with no rhythm whatsoever who would get laughed out of the local open mic sessions for being so shit. Local legend has it that one night he sold his soul to Satan in return for musical gifts. He transformed overnight into this incredible poet, a troubadour telling raw tales about life and the difficulties faced when going part-time in the world of finance law in order to focus on your art, all set to delicious blues licks.
I want to find out from Howlin’ Piers how he conjured up Satan so that I can offer him my soul in return for better writing talent. But Piers is still in bed when I call. He’s very upset to find out that it’s past midday when I wake him up. Having failed to get up in the morning, it means he can’t write a blues song today and will have to try again tomorrow.
But Piers does at least give me the instructions for summoning up Satan. He tells me it can only be done by listening to a Red Hot Chilli Peppers song and complimenting it. I can hardly bear to think about performing such a vile and wrong deed but I need this writing talent badly. So I return to the flat and find some videos on Youtube. It takes me five attempts to get any positive words out about the Chilli Peppers without rushing to the toilet to throw up, but finally I manage it. There is a tremendous hissing noise and my living room suddenly smells like the most awful fart.
Stood in front of me is a man who looks like Lofty from EastEnders. He introduces himself as Satan. I tell him he doesn’t look like what I imagined Satan to look like.
Try saying something original, you silly cunt, says Satan.
I can’t, I reply. That’s why I’ve summoned you up. I want to sell my soul to you in exchange for writing talent and inspiration.
Satan informs me that he sold his soul-collecting business last year. He now runs a firm providing racist and sexist trolls on the internet.
Google now own all of the damned souls so you’ll have to sell yours to them, he says, telling me that I have to type ‘sell my soul’ into Google and hit ‘I’m feeling lucky’.
Right, I’m off to sexually intimidate some feminists on Twitter, says Satan and he vanishes, taking the horrible fart stench with him. I’m straight onto Google. Sure enough, within two hours I’m submitting an absolute peach of a tale to the short story competition. It’s about an heroic internet search engine that saves the planet and fights off two evil baddies called Bing and Jeeves.
Thursday – I’m feeling hugely inspired after selling my soul to Google. I stay up all night writing song lyrics, which is a bit daft as I’m not in a band. To rectify this, I call on my neighbour Bilinda Butcher who used to be in shoegazer band My Bloody Valentine. I ask her if she wants to form a band with me and present her with 57 songs I’ve written in the last 12 hours. To my delight, she says yes.
We form a stoner rock band called Chrome Guff and spend all day at Bilinda’s flat in West Norwood writing three albums’ worth of songs. It’s a huge culture shock for Bilinda, having primarily worked with Kevin Shields who is much more of a one album every 22 years kind of songwriter. It’s a huge culture shock for me too, having never done anything musically before in my life apart from a brief stint as a lead singer in a Swindon band called Scurvy Factory where the highlight of my career was getting kicked out of the venue by the sound engineer five minutes before our first gig for knocking the microphone over onto his head as he sorted out some leads on the floor. The rest of the band had to go on without me and played about ten minutes of messy dirge before they were unplugged and told to bugger off.
I’m confident that Chrome Guff can surpass those heady heights. We have a good combination of Bilinda’s meaty riffs and my enthusiastically screamed vocals. We pick out our favourite song, a love song called ‘Put Your Loving Arms Up My Bottom’, and upload it to Youtube. Within a couple of hours it has nearly a million views.
Bilinda has a great idea. Why don’t we try out a handful of songs at the open mic session at the Great North Wood pub tonight? I’m up for it. My creative juices feel like they’re geysering out of me right now. Tonight West Norwood, tomorrow the world!
We arrive at the pub nice and early and put our names down on the list of performers. But we hit a problem. I come face-to-face with the sound engineer and we recognise each other instantly. It’s Tony Holland, the guy who booted me out of my own gig all those years ago in Swindon. Tony still bears a grudge and he refuses to do the sound engineering for the gig if I’m part of it. It takes a lot of persuading and a promise from me to be on my very best behaviour to get him to change his mind. He does so reluctantly.
We’re on last and there’s a lot of anticipation once word gets out that Bilinda Butcher of My Bloody Valentine is playing. We’re given a 20 minute slot, enough for 4-5 songs. I’m slightly nervous but looking forward to it. Finally, it’s our turn and we take our places on the stage. It’s just me and Bilinda performing as a kick-ass stoner rock duo.
We’re limbering up and Tony Holland is in his familiar position fumbling about with leads on the floor. That’s when I get the flashback, stood directly behind him just like I was twenty-odd years ago, staring down at the back of that fat humourless neck and the urge overcomes me. I do it again.
The microphone stand topples over and clonks him on the back of the head. All hell breaks loose and before I know it I’m outside the venue and the bouncers won’t let me back in. Bilinda has to perform on her own but, without a vocalist, it’s just guitar noise. She resorts to cranking up the reverb and hitting the venue with a ‘You Made Me Realise’ style wall of noise but it’s too much for the place. People start to leave and Chrome Guff get the plug pulled on them on their debut gig, just like Scurvy Factory did in the 90s.
Kevin Shields might average about one song every five years but at least he’s there on stage for the fucking gig!, spits Bilinda outside the pub before storming off. And that was the story of Chrome Guff. Three albums and half a gig in one day before disbanding due to ‘musical differences’.
Friday – My girlfriend Rosa L stays over at my place on Thursday night but when I wake up in the morning, she’s gone. I know what’s happened. It’s happened a few times before. She’s gone sleepwalking.
It’s because of the sleeping pills she takes to help her cope with my loud snoring. They’re powerful medication. She’s sleepwalked quite some distance on previous occasions. Once she got as far as Croydon, woke up in the middle of the town centre, an experience she described as like waking into a nightmare. On another occasion she was discovered up a tree in Sydenham Hill Woods.
I search the house but can’t see Rosa L anywhere. I check with Geert the Dutch ghost but he hasn’t seen her. I call her mobile number but get voice mail. I check the high street, the local pubs and cafes, nothing. I call Croydon police and ask if there’s been any reports of a woman in a nightgown screaming in the town centre but no joy.
By mid-afternoon I’m getting worried. Her somnambulism has never had her missing for this length of time. I’ve been all over Tulse Hill making enquiries but it’s like she’s just disappeared. To make matters worse, I get back to the flat and Geert’s in a panic. He’s broken the toilet and destroyed the flat with the most awful stench.
I ask Geert what the hell he’s been eating and he tells me he’s been snacking on dead pigeons in the attic cupboard. They’ve obviously upset his stomach. I wrap a towel around my head and arm myself to deal with the blockage. As I’m bracing myself to tackle it, an arm suddenly appears from the bowl. Both Geert and I yell out in shock.
It’s the toilet zombie!! screams Geert. But it’s not. It’s Rosa L squeezing herself out of the toilet. Soaking wet and slightly shitty.
You’re back! I cry, gagging slightly. I decide to save the hug until later.
Yeah, she says. I must have sleepwalked into the toilet.
Poor Rosa L. I say it must have been awful for her, but she shakes her head.
It’s another world down there, once you get past the shit-pipes, she says. It’s like an enchanted forest. Squirrels, butterflies, the chirping of birdsong…
I fear that Rosa L may be confusing reality with a sleepwalking dream but she’s adamant that’s what she experienced.
Everything was magical until I tried to come back and that idiot started mashing his digested pigeon carcass into my face, she says. Still, it sure beats waking up in Croydon town centre.
Saturday – Today was blighted by a journey home on the night bus that I won’t forget for a long time. I don’t like using the night bus, especially at weekends, primarily because I have a dreadful fear of being vomited on. There always seems to be a couple of candidates on the weekend night bus, swaying about, slurring, belching, who could at any moment spray the contents of their guts across the vehicle interior.
Tonight, panic set in when a man on the upper deck sat three seats behind me suddenly yelled out ‘I’m gonna be sick!’. He made a desperate move towards the stairs of the bus but was too drunk to stay on his feet and collapsed in the aisle right next to my seat. I was expecting him to dispense of his dinner via the northern exit hole right at my feet but he was holding on and whimpering ‘Somebody please help me off the bus, I’m gonna be sick’.
I steeled myself, got up and lifted him to his feet. He was retching and gagging as I pulled him down the stairs as fast as I could. I screamed to the driver ‘Open the door!’ and, as they burst open, I tossed his heaving frame out onto the pavement and watched him crawl off into the night as the bus pulled off.
I ascended the stairs and returned to my seat. Giddy with relief, I smiled at the demure elderly lady sat next to me and said ‘That was a close shave’. She turned to face me, opened her mouth and burped a thick geyser of chunder right into my face.
I’m dreadfully sorry, I had no idea that was going to happen, she said.
I couldn’t handle it and immediately projectile vomited. The discharge covered the three rows of people in front of me, some of it rebounding off a man’s shoulder and landing on top of a burger just as it was going into a young girl’s mouth. She screamed and threw the burger backwards and it hit a sleeping child in the face. The child, who had been sleeping in his mother’s arms, woke up. The mother realised what had happened and tried to wipe the vomit from the child’s face but then started to be ill herself. To try and stop herself from barfing over her kid, she covered her mouth with her hand and the liquid ejection sprayed everywhere.
This awful sight made three other passengers yak into their own laps while a fourth made a mad dash to leave the bus while filling the aisle with puke only to slip up and land face down in his own stream. The bus driver must have heard the commotion as he was now stood at the top of the stairs surveying the carnage.
Right, everyone get off the bus, now! he shouted, before muttering to himself oh Jesus Christ it fucking stinks, and then he ralphed all over himself and all the way down the stairs.
I couldn’t stay on the bus another second so I pushed my way past the heaving driver and headed down the stairs. I heard this bleeeuuuuggghhhh!!! from behind me as the bus driver emptied a second load which hit me on the back of the head and slid down the back of my shirt. I reached the lower deck and was spewing everywhere again. Pretty much everyone on the lower level was crying. I was crying too. I hit the emergency exit button, got off the bus and staggered home covered in at least five different types of blown chunks.
Apart from that, it was a pretty good night.
Sunday – I’m excited. Tomorrow I fly to Barcelona for a week-long holiday with Rosa L. I sort my packing out in the early evening. I always leave it until the last minute but it doesn’t really matter as I’m a fairly light traveller and don’t pack much.
I only need a small suitcase. I employ my usual technique of placing the suitcase on my bed and then gathering everything I want to take in a pile next to the suitcase before loading it all in.
Just before I begin packing the suitcase, I notice a tear to the fabric on the inside. It looks quite deep. Upon inspecting it, I discover that I can reach my whole arm inside the tear, which is odd because the suitcase itself isn’t as deep as the length of my arm. I push down further but over-reach and my entire body ends up inside this tear in the suitcase. I find myself falling down this dark shaft before landing with a thump.
I’m in what looks like an airport surrounded by mandrills. They’re all queueing up to go somewhere. I’m at the front of the queue and an airport official, who is also a mandrill, shouts ‘ticket’ at me.
I…I, er… I stumble, not knowing what to say.
The mandrill official loses his patience and shouts for the security guards, two mandrills who approach at speed carrying guns.
He’s with us, says one of the mandrills in the queue. He’s our gofer.
The guards are waved away and I’m let through airport security with these two mandrills, who look like they’re a couple.
Thanks, I say.
Shut up and carry our bags, says the male of the couple. Both he and his girlfriend pile their luggage onto me as we head onto the plane.
Coincidentally, the plane is heading to Barcelona. Great, I think. Maybe when I’m there I can call Rosa L, explain to her what’s happened and arrange to meet her there tomorrow. But when I arrive, it’s made fairly clear by the Mandrill couple – who are called Brian and Tina – that I’ve been brought along as some kind of personal slave. Worse still, it seems to be completely normalised. Barcelona appears to be populated by mandrills, with the odd human tagging along as a gofer.
I have a dreadful week in which I’m made to carry out no end of duties for Brian and Tina. Shopping, taking care of their personal hygiene, scheduling, carrying their bags around for them, morning alarm calls. Plus I have to entertain them. They’re incredibly easy to entertain – all they ever want me to do is strip down to my underpants and perform forward rolls – but they want it done all the time. Whenever I’m not carrying out another chore, Brian is clapping his hands and yelling ‘roly-poly’ into my face. It’s annoying.
I want to escape but fear it might be worse. They tell me that loose gofers are regularly shot. Things get immeasurably worse four days into the holiday when Brian and Tina have a blazing row and Tina goes home early. I spend three horrific days with Brian where, on top of all my other duties, I have to act as substitute for Tina in the bedroom. Thankfully Brian is very lazy in bed and only wants hand-jobs, but he wants eight a night. By the time we leave Barcelona, my hands are blistering.
Relief finally comes when we’re back in London, at Gatwick airport, and I have to walk through the special gofer scanner. I step through and, on the other side, emerge from my suitcase. Rosa L is standing by the bedroom door.
What are you doing inside the suitcase, you fool? she asks. You’d better get a move on otherwise we’ll be up all night and we’ve got to be up early for the flight in the morning.
Yeah, do you mind if we cancel these flights and go somewhere else instead? I ask, inspecting my sore palms. I’ve just remembered that I’ve got some pretty bad memories of Barcelona.
hieronymousbentfinger 