Twelve Steps Down to the Lab

   ‘Shit sticks’

That’s what he used to say, the Old Man. And he should know; working with shit every day as he did. Fuck knows where he’d studied chemistry, for he never went to university. Nightschool it must have been. Working daze and then dozing into the lab, half-cut on best. He always had a thing about doing the jobs that would always be needed. Gravedigger. Coffin-maker. Dustman. Baker. Tailor. Barber. Rag and boner, like his Old, Old Man (his Old Man had kicked the ashtray years ago, surrounded by pipe-fumes, watching George Formby. If it wasn’t the smoking that did him in, it was George.) But he chose shit removal, did my old man. Chemically sifting the shit, puke, piss and blood from water that should never have been recycled. I reckon that’s why I’ve never been into drinking tap water. The stories my Old Man told me about the water, I may as well have been drinking shit.

   They had an old motorcycle, he and his brother.

‘Couple of junkies they were’ the Old Lady would say on one or another of her frequent and vitriolic reminiscences, ‘Couple of bloomin’ junkies.’

So the old man, young as he was then, scooted off to the nightschool lab, collected later by his brother. When he’d finished, they’d disappear down the drinkhole, stagger off to bed and rise early to go to whatever day jobs they were lucky or unlucky enough to have. So the story goes, with or without elaboration.

   Whoever else came before the Old Lady, I’ll leave to the imagination, but he did had a young wife and two kids who he never saw again after he drank and cheated his way through a feckless marriage. (But certainly not a fuckless life, for he sure loved to fuck, the Old Man did.) Between stints on the shit farm, he took up the trumpet, splitting notes over Miles Davis soundtracks played on the old reel to reel. This provided an outlet for screwing his way around, from big band to small band to false overtime and back to the wife with a scrotum full of gonorrhoea. So that’s where he met the Old Lady, at one of his jazz club extravaganzas, like a young Eric Cantona without the ball skills, but who needs football when you’ve got the gift of the pickup? And pick her up he did, as his wife struggled to settle sleeping toddlers, he and the Old Lady played duets in the key of blue.

   How she expected him to change for her benefit was a mystery known only to women who love bastards, but the Old Lady sure expected something: Fidelity. Do you think it happened? Did it fuck. But they shacked up together, and come hell and monthly trips down the genito-urinary clinic, they stuck together. So he worked days and nights on the shit farm, they played early hours in the clubs and bars, her on sax, him on trumpet. They don’t call it the blues for no reason. They shu’ was sad together. And to add mystery to misery, after I popped out, unplanned, unwanted and undoubtedly the carrier of some strain of something or another, they bought a broken down house on the cheap as a DIY project. And in the shit-fragranced cellar, he set up a lab of equipment stolen from work.

   There were twelve steps down. The door was an ancient, woodwormed and dry-rotted thing with cracked panels crazed with grey-green lead paint in matt and never redone. The flakes littered the splintery floor like the dandruff of a scabied dog, never swept, mixed with the purple-grey fluff that suffused the entire Georgian tumble-down house. This was the door to the lab of the Sewage King; my Old Man. There were Bunsen burners, rubber pipes, flasks, all manner of pyrex, petri dishes, crucibles in stacks and three-legged stands. What the fuck he did down there, I had no idea. He’d also dubiously acquired a green-enamel painted rust riddled set of drawers which seeped hazardous substances. Lime. Hydrochloric acid. Unlabelled jars and ceramic vessels and pungent smells. He’d written in permanent black marker on hand-torn strips of masking tape,

‘Corrosive’

‘Highly volatile’

That sort of thing. His favourite emblem was a skull and crossbones, marked POISON.

   As years flowed in dregs of Captain Morgan and homebrew stolen from the virgin-Mary-blue airing cupboard, sentences lurked in the depths of my consciousness.

   ‘I’ve got AIDS: don’t share my toothbrush or razor!’

   ‘I never wanted you. I would have left the bastard years ago if I didn’t have you.’

   ‘I had to sell my sports car because it only had two seats, and you wouldn’t fit in.’

   ‘The only reason I didn’t commit suicide was because of you’

This was the Old Lady, caught up in her own trap of happy family dreams, dreaming of change, of the day she’d be loved. The AIDS was a scare, not for real, well, as far as I know. I went into school, well, preschool, aged four, spouting ‘My mummy’s got AIDS, she’s going to die.’ My world was suspended in swigs of self-administered calming pink calpol and the homegrown green the Old Man spiked my grub with to get a good night’s sleep. And under the big, old, cold-watered, broken-boilered, roof-leaking, crumble-plastered house, the lab festered with secret recipes and hanging corpses of rabbits, pheasants, geese and ducks murdered by the Old Man in crack-of-dawn roadkill missions.

   There was an L-Shaped, grassless garden they called The Yard out the back. From the window of the Lab, if you looked through the hollyhocks you could see the Old Man’s patch of spinach, ganja, goosegogs, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, opium poppies, ragwort and oxalis. The ash tree stopped the sunlight in the back part where the compost heap festered. That was the tomato patch, but the Old Man preferred the shit farm tomatoes, grown from the arseholes of many and fed with the richest combination of humanure in the peripheries of the sludge tanks. They were huge and deep red, and I wouldn’t touch them, never mind eat them. But it was the poppies I loved the best. As they began to raise their sleeping buds, I’d check for the first show of glistening tissue-paper petal, guessing the colour and teasing the buds open to take a peek. Purple-white, pink-white, red-black, purple-black, I had no favourite. I’d sit for hours watching the dewdrops on the cabbage-like leaves, tearing fragments and eating the lettuce-flavoured pieces. As the morning blooms opened, I’d lick my finger and wipe it over pollen-laden stamens, tasting like a bee and burying my nose in its baby-podded heart.

   Sometimes we need to piece the fragments of memory together to understand how we got to the places we travelled on-purpose unawares. The Lab will always be part of that process of growing memories like the seeds I sprinkled from brown-ripe pods into juvenile hands, vocalising vowels and consonants which smelled of warm soil and poppy sap. Oh-pee-yum. Opeeeyum Oh-p-iiiii-yum.

   But that was long ago now. Today the house is full of designer investment tycoons who bought it up at auction. I hope they enjoy the ghosts. 
 © Vee 1993-2012