Episode 3 don't drink the water!

It was the closing moments of the second summer of hate and we were heading home from our first family holiday on the continent. Songs from psychedelic era Pink Floyd filled my head, care of a second hand compilation received from Derek Bolus for my thirteenth birthday. Corfu had been strange. Wandering the mountains and hill paths, I saw nobody except black-clad women with bony-looking children and asses. I felt I couldn't wander off entirely and no one would ever discover my whereabouts. I lay beside the unfilled hotel swimming pool and dipped into Rick Wright's 'Paintbox'.

Last night I had too much to drink
Sitting in a club with so many fools
Playing to rules
Trying to impress
But feeling rather empty...

I didn't understand, but I knew what he was saying...

When I wasn't tanning my scars or wondering what damage I could have done to the pool had I remembered my skateboard, I'd be loitering outside the hotel bookshop. Waiting til the staff were distracted, I'd slip a copy of 'Logan's Run' under my shirt and steal away to the reading lounge where I'd tear breathlessly through the narrative, halting only where Logan was captured and forced to sleep with seven nubile androids.

The first orgasm was good

The second was all right

The third was bad

The fourth was agony

The fifth was damnation

The sixth...

At this point, Logan escaped both his bondage and the author's lexical capabilities, but I'd be forced to return to the beginning of the passage, to ponder again the scenario I might one day have to face...

Returning to the book shelf one day, I was seized by a Kaftan-wearing woman and forced to account for my 'literary borrowing'. The fact that I read at all was something to be noted in Rottenbrough. Not for nothing was I known as 'The Professor' (or 'Lennie Wanker'). but I managed to buy her silence only by offering to buy a copy of 'Dracula'. Christ, what kind of bourgeois image was I trying to portray here?

Memories of Shrapnel raced constantly through my head. I was on a five year survival course where keeping your head down was the only way to avoid having your self-esteem blown regularly apart. I'd occasionally smash a fellow pupil in the face to applause from assembled onlookers, but most of the 400 blows came in the opposite direction. Compromising situations came out of the blue, like an offender just released and looking for vengeance. I escaped the teen torments of acne and nosebleeds, but that just meant mishap, when it came, was unpredictable. Acceptance is all important in those formative years. Even if you'd prefer to turn your nose up at people on principle, the urge to compromise is overwhelming. When the acceptable face of bullying, Peter Heifer, told King I was his new best friend, I felt like asking him to marry me. It was the kind of relief that prompts hostages to offer themselves to their captors. By the end of the day though, the alliance was through...

'I felt his shimmering lips, hot breath and sharp white teeth. I closed my eyes and waited, in ecstasy..."

"And what do you call this this...!!?" raged my mother, the corporation estate lass turned middle England crusader. Christ, who needed religion with the guilt she foisted upon me? About my record collection; my mediocre school reports; what was lurking at the bottom of my bag; playing 'Grand Prix' with miniature Formula 1 models...

"I wonder how many other 12 year olds play with toy cars?"

Who gave a fuck!?

And so now 'Dracula'. Why couldn't she blast the motives of publishers prepared to print the juiciest passage on the front cover?

"If your father doesn't change his ways soon, there'll be a divorce!'

She'd thrown away her L-plates at the third time of asking and was ferrying me to school while Pops was out on a delivery. After the usual round of complaints about life at the shop and how he should be sorting things out for the better, she dropped the bombshell. I was stunned. For all her war-era mentality rationing of support and making me feel I was on trial every day of my school life, they were all I had. Every child needs to know they're important enough for their parents to bury their differences, at least until they're old enough to make a go of things themselves. For only children anyhow this statement holds true. I was hooked on their slow drip of affection and tearing it away seemed needlessly callous.

In truth, she wasn't having it easy. They were both overworked and she was suffering crippling migraines as the menopause kicked in. Six and a half day working week with no family to help; except me of course, and I'd get out of it when I could. Most kids would. Unfulfilled dreams. No wonder she felt the need to blurt it all out that afternoon. But sorry, I was a demanding kid. I needed that emotional support. No sisters, brothers or grandparents to turn to. A few distant aunts and uncles; My best friends fundamentally bastards, like myself.

On the Friday evening, we headed into the mountains. Father and I had hammered out a plan. I was going to see the excursion out at the hotel disco, with the young girl on the coach opposite me, if the scheme had any flexibility round the edges. Father favoured livelying it up down the road at the taverna we'd discovered a couple of nights before. Returning from the excursion, he was going to spend an hour or two getting the locals warmed up on the dance floor, cadge a lift back to the hotel, rendezvous with his sweat-soaked and beaming Sonny Jim, before ferrying us both back to the taverna with another lift he'd somehow organise. It sounded workable...

As usual, he was into his ever-ready stride before I'd tied my shoe laces. While he regaled the party with tales of putting coppers down manholes and playing 'Puk a Pu' with the Chinese in Whitechapel, I was stuck with a speccy git from Rochdale, who having lied continually about nuclear power, suddenly grabbed the water decanter and brought it down on an enormous spider crawling across the table, proceeding to slice off the intact half with his dinner knife. I went outside and found a toilet too disgusting to throw up in. I was not having a good night. Earlier that evening, Pops had rounded up a group of local boys and organised them into football teams. He'd called for me to join in, but I'd kept my distance, convinced my affluence was an insurmountable barrier to our association and worrying subsequently they'd think I was stuck up.

We made it down from the mountains with the sun still hovering over the horizon, but for some reason the disco had was closing that evening, and suddenly nobody wanted to follow the 'Limehouse Kid' down the road to the taverna. Tomorrow it was back to Rottenbrough and our miserable meat and two potato lives. I fell asleep to his haunting, 'What a bloody washout!" lament.