> What have you got another new boyfriend? I asked

   > Yeah, well I might 'ave! Why, what's it gotta do wiv you?

   > Is he coming round? I asked.

   > Don't start ya fuckin' moaning! You aint even seen 'im yet... Ya might like 'im. He's a taxi driver.

   > That black man who dropped you off yesterday?

Mum looked at me like I was too clever to live. She drank a drink and got a little meaner.

   > When he comes I want you to make yaself scarce! He'll run a fucking mile if he see's that miserable face a yours. He won't be here for long and I need the money so don't fuck this one up for me, please!

His name was Carlton and he arrived in the same battered blue Ford fiesta I'd seen drop mum off the night before. I always knew when mum had fucked the taxi driver or given promise of it as she'd get out the front passenger side with no tights on and sometimes carrying her shoes. And it was never drivers of Black taxis, always the penniless mini-cab drivers, those men with greasy hair and dry scalp, unshaven, bead seat cover, always fourteen hours into a never-ending shift, always one fare away from absolute ruin. I watched Carlton get out. He was a large, round shouldered black man, a little heavy by the chest and stomach and with an irregular, buttermelon shaped head. He wore a plain red t-shirt, beige cotton trousers, and leather sandals over bare feet. His skin was not the healthy, shiny reddish brown of West Africans, but a dusty, sepia tone which gave the impression he'd been out in London's smog for too long. He walked like a man low on confidence, or a man who had no place to go. His face was one you'd  find on a heavyweight boxer come the end of his career. He had a damaged left eye – paralyzed and half closed over like he'd been hit with an iron. He was either a gentle giant or someone who'd sustained some kind of deep brain injury. As he loped up to the front gate he must have seen mum as suddenly he let out a huge smile and visibly, withdrew into himself.

From upstairs I listened to the talking in the hall. Carlton's voice was timid and kind, with a London accent. It seemed so out of keeping with his appearance that for a moment I wondered if it wasn't someone else who'd sneaked in on his back. Mum asked him how his day had been, which was another surprise. She didn't usually ask her lovers such stuff, just led them straight to her bedroom while they both cursed different things in their own individual hells. Carlton said he was exhausted and would like a tea or a soft drink.

   > You don't drink at all? asked Mum.

   > I do... sometimes. But not when I'm driving and not to get rat arsed.

   > What, an ya don't get rat arsed on that fucking wacky backy ya smoke, Mum said, a slight whip on her tongue, on the defensive.

After learning that Carlton didn't drink I stopped listening. It was fine. He could fuck my mother all he liked.

*

The thing with Carlton was that he was extremely shy and nervous. Even I seemed to rattle him, and I was a creeping ghost myself. The only time he was confident or extrovert was when he was sitting in the front seat of his taxi. There he was in control, knowing what to say and who not to say it to. Not once did he ever seem out of sorts when he had his back to people and road signs in front of him. But outside his domain, without all he knew at flicking or braking distance, he appeared lost and didn't quite seem to know how the world worked or his place within it.

Carlton was never one of my mother's steady lovers. He was one of a number who came around on the weekly, like a debt collector, and was either let in and paid that weeks installment or was ignored until he gave up and mooched off cursing and thinking he should get a new job. Unlike some of the others Carlton never turned up unscheduled. He arrived only on his day, always on time, and even then somehow seemed surprised he was let in. Sometimes he even took Mum out. On these days he'd pull up out front, beep three times, then whisk mum off as she pulled the passenger door close behind her. I'm not sure where they used to go. Mum used to say 'Lover's Lane'. After an hour or so they'd return, the engine in the car then subdued, cruising down slowly, a purr in the darkening evening, Carlton dropping Mum off and then crawling away with two beeps and fading tail lights into his last shift of the night. Mum would enter the house and climb the stairs, a plastic bag full of booze bottles clinking away, her own melancholic jingle.

That went on for some weeks, then one day I opened the door to Carlton and he was stood out on the doorstep with an armful of books. I watched him curiously – the books. They were those huge, colourful, square things, ages 4 – 6: Mum was gonna teach him how to read and write. Carlton hurried up the stairs. Mum met him in her vomit scented dressing gown. Higher Education for Adults. She shot me a drunken glare and closed the bedroom door.

I'm not sure if Carlton ever really wanted to learn how to read and write or if it was just a rouse to grant him further access into my mother's bedroom. By the same token I'm not sure if Mum ever really wanted to teach him or if it was a rouse on her part to keep a good man who had probably realised he'd never get any more than what he was getting already. Whatever the truth, the books weren't just for show, and now, besides the grunts and moans of animal language there was a more uncouth, inadequate one: English. Carlton pronouncing over and over C – A – R : CAR. Carlton Has A Blue Car.

So Carlton was a gentle giant. He was shy and warm and not just there to nail my mother and leave. But for all that, and even with time passed, Carlton never lost his timidity. Apart from opening the door to him, or being given a quick once around the block in his car, he kept himself for my mother and I never really got to know him. Maybe in part he was embarrassed and uncomfortable in front of the kid whose mother he was fucking? If he was then it was a debt he didn't mind paying. Over the next year Carlton kept up his visits, kept up his English lessons, and kept himself to himself. All that really changed was his car gradually fell apart, less and less of it arriving with him each week. Then one day there was no car at all: Carlton arrived on foot.

By the time Carlton neared the end of his stay between my mother's legs we were living in temporary accommodation the other side of London. I returned home and found him sitting at the kitchen table with his nursery books and a travel bag full of belongings. Down and out.

   > Shane, Mum said, I've got something to tell you: Carlton's staying the night!

She said it like it should annoy me, like it was my punishment for something in her life. I shrugged. It would be the first time Carlton had ever stayed over but many others had. It meant nothing. And anyway, Carlton was better than most. As I walked away I felt Mum planning and scheming, her contempt burning through me so as I could make it out the other side. A little later that evening mum came wandering into the living room,naked. I pretended I hadn't seen her and kept my head down and looked at the TV. She stood there staring at me, waiting for me to acknowledge her. I didn't. She cleared her throat theatrically.

   > Er, Shane, she said, stopping, playing out the moment, I've spent the night with Carlton... We've talked a lot...  and I'VE decided: HE'S moving in.... and YOU'RE MOVING OUT! I want you gone by the morning. Get packing!

I was only just fourteen. I ignored her and listened as she backed out, felt her way around the door frame, before staggering and falling back in her bedroom. The next morning I crossed her in the kitchen. She was naked and out of it again,  trying to buttera slice of stale bread.  When I passed her she sucked her teeth but was too drunk to  make eye contact. She cursed, but it was neither a curse word or anything English, just a vicious sound put in my direction.

Carlton lasted four days. My mother drank a lot and would now come staggering out the bedroom not only leathered drunk but also with a huge fresh joint hanging out her gob. Her hair was matted and she'd walk off, not sure where, as if her programming was completely fucked. The bedroom became a cube of smoke, Carlton occasionally visible through it, laying on the bed in his shorts and staring over to where the television was. On the last evening there was a lot of drink and a lot of weed, and when that was half through there was a lot of crashing and screaming before Carlton came backing out the bedroom holding his trousers and shoes. My mother was screaming about him raping her and wanting to fuck her up the arse, calling him a cunt and an idiot and insulting him about not being able to read or write. Just as Carlton was bending down to pull his trousers up a huge, square, colourful book, ages 5 – 7, hit him in his bad eye. Mum screamed in delight and hurled the next one, books smashing into the door frame and hall wall. Carlton looked sad and shocked and for a moment, scared, human. He couldn't understand the ferocious change that had swept over Mum and the sudden hatred that she saw him with. For the first time he looked at me, really looked, but I had nothing to tell him. This was the English language, and he knew it better than me. And like that, bleeding and half naked, Carlton fled for his life, and we never saw nor heard of him again...

Wolverhampton Tommy was a repulsive little shit of a man. Barely five foot six, he was an assortment of unwanted parts: short fat stumpy legs; a huge gut that spilled over his waistband and took his grubby vest up with it; a stocky, compact head; no neck as such to speak of; a chest that looked like it held a shriveled heart; and arms which were too small to do most of the things they had evolved for. Apart from a thinning pitcher's mound at the back, Tommy had a full head of grey hair. When washed it became a natural bouffant, though usually it was slapped full of Bryl Creem and combed flat to the scalp, a little dry tuft at the back curling up, giving the impression he had a filthy neck. What wasn't in dispute is that he was a selfish man, a pair of black-framed National Health specs helping to further magnify only that which was in front of his own existence. A gambler, a drinker, a semi-dosser, he lived off a diet of chips and fried bread and mushrooms. His teeth were grey and loose and ground down flat like a herbivore's. He had a habit of peering over his glasses like he was an intellectual, or a judge; a pencil constantly behind his ear which he used to pick out horses and fill in crossword puzzles. Each morning, except Thursdays, he could be found sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by bread crumbs, his balls spilling out his baggy y-fronts, the fronts patterned with piss marks and melted butter. After breakfast he'd dress in a pair of One-Size-Fits-All jeans, dirty white sport socks, a pair of backless comfy slippers, and over his vest a red and blue striped bathrobe. Like that he'd run down to the newsagents and pick up the racing paper along with some other rag with even less news in it. I guess Tommy was a kind of stock lot of middle-aged British men at that time, masquerading as the disillusioned white working class, but really, avoiding work at all costs and scraping by on reversed shirts, cheap Bic razors, pots of weak sugary tea and penny accumulator bets.

Why my mother shacked up in a bedsit with such a man is a mystery. Even after years of reflection I have no answer. Tommy had nothing going for him, no wooing feathers at all. More than the junkies and the perverts and the ultra violent (who at least had a kink to entertain mum with) it was men like Tommy who baffled me. I couldn't understand why she'd let such a dull excuse the intimate pleasure of getting between her legs. It was sad. It was sad because of what it said about Mum: that she needed no reason to attach herself to someone; that any warmblooded creature, no matter what their looks or intellect, was company enough; that loneliness has no standards and bypasses all natural quality control.

Tommy wasn't even a decent fuck. Neither was he blessed with an arm-sized cock. From what I could discern the sex was miserable and made worse by his meagre resources. Tommy fucked like a man with heart trouble. I used to lay on the floor, in the dark, listening to his three minutes of bucking and heaving, Mum reviling him, hating him, sometimes raining her fists down on his back and shrieking as he hogged and slobbered away. It wasn't a serious attempt to get him off, more something to try and bring some passion out in him, turn him into the hulk, a monster who'd flip her around and drive it straight in her arse without a word. But it never happened. After three minutes Tommy was done for. He'd roll off like a fattened leech, back to his side of the bed, straight into Crossword Position, flicking the light on and adjusting his glasses as he took his folded newspaper and began rubbing words out and putting new ones in – mum besides him, unsatisfied, drinking herself unconscious and puking over the side of the bed.

Whatever animal Tommy was, in himself, he seemed strangely content. In fact that was his only real quality, well, that and his ability to pass huge chunks of time, always finding something slow and delberate to do. His days and weeks were all planned out; times and days and dates he would do things. Everything from getting up to going to bed was accounted for by a time. Even his drinking, an alcoholic, but Tommy never drank a drop before 4pm and never after 12. But by far the weirdest calender event was his weekly strip down wash. As he wouldn't use the communal bathroom he had his full-body scrub, every Thursday morning, right there in the room, stripped naked and standing on the previous day's newspaper. With a saucepan of hot water besides him, he'd be there, in full glare of everyone, soaping his cock and bollocks and then squatting a touch to clean the crack of his arse. It was during his wash-time that Tommy's unfortunate physical characteristic became apparent. His arms were so short, that when he lathered his chest, he looked like a grown up thalidomide baby. And all the while he was doing this, his pants, which he'd washed in cold water and rang out in the sink, were stretched over the kettle on the stove, steaming away so as they'd be dry for his 10am jaunt to the shops.

Bizarre habits, that are usually borne out of poverty, came to Tommy via his unrelenting attempt to scrimp through life without ever having to work. He had kinda stripped all the fat off living and was down to economizing with the bare bones, arranging them in different ways so as to keep his life standing. He'd do stuff like keep potato peel for soup, or fry them to a crisp and munch them between doorsteps of buttered bread. Teabags too. He found that with six used teabags you could strain them to get an extra cup. His bets were the same. He'd somehow make the racing last all day, placing multiple petty wagers across the cards, criss-crossing them in double, trebles and accumulators, working it so as there was hope right up until the last race. At fifty he was already a part of the old boys crowd, counting out pennies in tens and sliding each little pile across to the cashier. Only it was amusing when the old boys did it and you kinda hoped they'd win: nobody hoped Tommy would win. The cashier took his pennies with contempt, avoiding his brown nicotine fingers on the way.

Without ever really doing anything disgusting Tommy disgusted people. All his scabby ways seemed to hint at more perverse stuff he'd maybe get up to alone. Mum was always looking at him with a deep hatred. As she drank herself silly she'd stare evil at him as he sat there in his glasses and vest, filling out his crosswords. That's when mum would get ratty and start picking fights, hissing nasty comments at him. Tommy would unscrew the cap of his whiskey bottle, turn a measured drop down his throat, then slowly recap the bottle and put it back on the side. The deliberateness with which he lived riled mum even more. She liked her men to do things without the fear of consequence, to drink whiskey fast and get drunk quick. This rationing of liquor and life that Tommy had mastered just made her being with him that little more incomprehensible.

A beautiful woman, Mum could have had almost any man she wanted. Though maybe that was it: she didn't want to choose but to be chosen. She knew any woman could sit in any bar and flash some knicker and serve it up on a plate, but to be wanted, really wanted, was something quite different.

Mum lived with Tommy for over a year in their bug ridden bedsit in Earls Court. Holed up in that decrepit building, with communal bathroom and toilets, they did everything in the room under one another's glare. With not even a toilet to retreat to, hatred wormed its way in, both beginning to despise the others' habits. Tommy would hate how mum would just lay there blitzed all day, always naked and falling about, giving him eyefuls of things from weird angles, which rather than turning him on turned him off. He's mantra at the end of it all was “Will you please cover that cunt of yours for Godsake!” She in turn despised him right down to the way he smoked – hand-rolled cigarettes squeezed between his thumb and forefinger, inhaling the smoke like it was the greatest pleasure on earth. It was mutual hatred, and as there'd not been any love to begin with it was more bitter than most.

By the time mum eloped with Tommy's sister their relationship was really over and dusted. Of course, Tommy was still furious, kept going on about deceit and betrayal, suddenly becoming infected with a violent, vicious, bullying streak which came out in threats and stalking. It was his selfishness again. Suffering only his own soreness and not registering at all the hell that he himself was to be around. That she left him for his own sister, well, no-one knows how Tommy thought about that as he never once broached the subject. Mum always said he only wanted her back so as he could leave her first. That made no sense to me at the time, not until years later when I was beaten to the trigger myself. Then I understood. Finally, however, Tommy did get mum back, though not entirely and not to himself. It was an incestuous affair involving his own sister, his new girlfriend and Mum – a fourway split over many months. I guess that's as good as Tommy ever got, though three minutes, between three women, well... I guess like always the girls had to pleasure themselves.

 

It began with a set of three Polaroid photos. Mum held them like playing cards, close to her chest and slightly turned in. Over the top of her hand Mum looked at me with a drunkard's contempt. She looked from cards to me, from me to cards, and then she played.

The first photo was of a middle aged woman laying naked on a double bed with her legs open like she was giving birth. She was a small, stringy, muscular thing with short cropped mousy  hair and a wide grin revealing a top front gold tooth.

   > Who d'ya think took that? Mum asked.

I looked at her blankly, embarrassed. Hesitantly I said, You???

Mum didn't reply. She snatched the photo back and handed me the next one.

In photo two mum had joined the woman on the bed. Now they both lay there, legs parted and overlapping, my mother smoking a fresh cigarette and caught so naturally that death could have been in the frame. It was one of those photos.

   > So who took that one then, smart-arse? She said. I offered no answer.

Mum took photo two and replaced it with photo three. This one was different. It was of a butch looking ginger haired woman, standing in the middle of a room in just a leather jacket with a pair of huge sloppy tits falling out. The woman was squat with fat, dimpled flesh around the thighs and hips. She had a large bushy 60's cunt, and hanging off her left foot was a pair of skimpy white knickers with a crusty yellow discharge sat in the crutch. I'm not sure that's what I was supposed to be focusing on but I couldn't help it. Somehow that stain told me more about what was going on than anything else.

   > That's Sandra, said mum, she took the photos of me and Pat.

I gave the picture back to mum.

   > Well, what d'ya think? She asked

   > Who are they? I answered

Mum looked at me full of some weird omnipresent hate. > My girlfriends, she hissed, WHY!

I didn't answer. There was no answer when mum was poisoned towards life like this. Instead I slowly crept away, praying she wouldn't call me back, off to find my brother and tell him that mum had turned lesbian.

* * *

Over the next weeks, whenever Mum arrived home, she spoke endlessly of Pat. She spoke of how violent Pat was, how she'd go out causing bar-fights and looking for tear-ups with men. She described how Pat would headbutt, punch and glass people, boasting that she was barred from almost every bar in London's Earls Court. .As most fights seemed to have originated over someone eying mum up, Mum appeared proud to have had inspired such protective violence in someone. Then Mum said the weirdest thing. While relating Pat's evening rampages of drink and terror, she mentioned that Pat was Tommy's younger sister.

   > Wolverhampton Tommy? Your boyfriend?  I asked.

   > Well what other fucking Tommy do I know, said Mum.

So it turned out that mum had left brother for sister, and if that wasn't incredible enough things would get a whole lot more fucked up and interwoven still.

#

   > Ow am yer cock? Heard a lotta 'bowt ya. Yo aw-roight fer a bit'ta TV?

Those were Pat's first words on meeting her in the flesh. She was standing just inside her flat in faded jeans, moccasins, and a transparent white string vest, her nipples playing peek-a-boo through the trestles. She was small and thin but wiry and muscular. She was a kinda  oblong shape,  like she'd been hung out to dry by the shoulders. She flashed me her gold tooth and her brown smokers teeth and I liked her.

In the front room, in a brown armchair, sat Sandra. Though very butch looking she was still the woman of the two. Her blond/ginger hair, short at the back, was styled a bit like a Teddy Boy's and a lot like an OAP's: puffy and highly sprayed. She slouched back in the armchair in a pair of cheap, shapeless, market jeans, her belly spilling over the elasticated waist. She didn't speak, just puffed cigarettes, swallowed beer from the can, and looked ahead like she was pissed of with the space in front of her. In the hallway Mum and Pat were kissing and laughing as if they had a private joke going. Then they trailed off down the hall and the bedroom door slammed close.

I watched Sandra. I couldn't help thinking of those knickers I'd seen in the photograph and the tufts of dimpled fat which were around her hips. In the dead, grey screen of the TV I could see her sour face. She kinda repulsed me, had the same effect that certain dairy products have on me. She was now crushing her beer can as she drank and making me uncomfortable. From the bedroom we could hear mum and Pat. They sounded like they were dreaming and kept hitting up against the wall. After a while the noises stopped and Mum came wandering into the front room. She was wearing the skimpiest of night shirts which only half covered her sex. She walked past us and over to a small cabinet from which she took a bottle of whiskey. As she left she turned her head away from Sandra and gave a theatrical shiver of disgust. Just after that Sandra hurled a half can of beer at the TV, squeezed into a gaudy unfashionable leather jacket and left. It would be nearly a year before I'd see her again, fondling Tommy's crotch in a beer garden as they talked about happiness and marriage. Mum was sat on Pat's knee opposite, looking beautiful but not looking at anyone. Brother and sister, each with the others old flame. Four people. All alcoholics. All desperately miserable. All pretending they were happy. All chasing something. I won't go into explicit details of what would unravel next, though I guess it's obvious. It took place in a grubby bedsit, in a grubby bed, and lasted many months. 

It was during my mothers relationship with Pat that I saw the most overtly sexual behavior of women. Erect cocks had been aplenty, and the male animal with the crazy leer of sexual lust on his face had become something of the norm. I had also seen my mother doing the most explicit things, though without registering any sexual bleep in me. Now I would see third party females partake in the carnal delights of the flesh: Pat eating my mother out in the back of a taxi; covertly masturbating on a bus; walking around in see-thru tops;  going to market in a fur coat and nothing more; relaxing back and pissing from park benches; knickers parted and glimpses of cunt at strange unexpected moments; things which peaked my interest and left a world of random erotic images in my head, some to the point of obsession. Still, for all of that, sex was a very small part of the equation, swamped ten fold by the drinking and violence. Compared to the times legs gave way, stomachs upchucked, beds got soiled and eyes got blackened, fucking was barely registered at all.

 Even when Mum was openly living with Pat, kissing and fondling in public, I never seriously thought of her as a lesbian. I  saw it as a kind of novelty, something outrageous... rode in the slipstream of my mother's audacious front. Sex was one thing but sexuality was something else, and though I knew the names and what they meant I was too young to understand past word and meaning. And if I ever thought that Mum was playing on the fashionable gay or bi-sexual tag of the time, going through a phase of deliberate experimentation, I was wrong. My mother's sexual relationship with Pat was genuine and passionate, and continued over many years, even passing through periods of sobriety. It was an on/off affair, but would ultimately be my mother's most enduring romance of her life.

I suppose the apex and decline of Mum and pat's relationship was Christmas Eve 1989 when Pat tried to strangle my 15 year old sister to death. Rachel had confronted Pat and blamed her for my mother hitting the bottle again and the consequences that would have on everyone. Pat, drunk to high heaven, flew into a murderous rage and got my sister by the throat, throttling her with no intention to stop. It took my mother, brother and I to wrestle Pat to the bed and prise her fingers loose from my sister's neck. After finally succeeding Rachel collapsed to the floor on jelly legs, her eyes bulged and bloodshot, making sounds like a dying pig while scrambling away in horror of what her mother's lover had just done to her. When my sister had recovered enough she wrapped herself up and left the flat, returning to our old home, to her dad, never for us to live together again. The broken family had just split some more.

By 1999, fifteen years after my mother first showing me those Polaroid pictures, the lives within and around them had changed drastically. Tommy was back in Wolverhampton, alone, and no longer speaking to his sister. Sandra had had two kids and now lived the other side of London with no partner. Mum was in a stable, long term relationship and had all but stopped drinking. And Pat had gotten married and was living with her husband in the same flat in Latimer Road. Pat told Mum she had married out of loneliness, that as she was getting older, and the years were beginning to take a toll, she wanted someone to share the life with. It was a convenient, sexless marriage but it worked and gave them both company and support through the illnesses both had picked up from years of alcoholism. Pat had cirrhosis of the liver, and Matt, her husband, suffered from a series of nervous disorders alongside the mild onset of Parkinson's disease.

It was Matt who called out the blue one day and told Mum that Pat was ill and she should come and visit her. When Mum arrived Pat was wrapped up on the sofa and looking extremely poorly. She was still recognizable, only now her hair was completely grey and she was thin and frail in a way she never was before. She still breathed neat whiskey fumes, and still sucked in her cigarettes through half clenched eyes, but the passion of hope and life were gone and now she smoked and drank to die, not as a rebellious act of living. She was jaundiced and emotional and on seeing Mum she broke down and sobbed like a child, clinging on to a memory of what had been. Mum, although not ill, had put on weight and the booze had affected her skin and lapped away at her beauty. There were no words, just two people holding each other while commiserating the death of beauty and health and the end of those faraway and bright wild times.

When Pat had recovered her Northern steel she poured a whiskey and lit another cigarette and told us how her liver had deteriorated further and probably wouldn't last the year. After everything I was still fond of Pat and to see her tendered by mortality endeared me to her further. She wasn't hard; she wasn't vicious; she wasn't a drunk. Now, she was just scared, and we're all that. That day passed like the clocks had been turned back. For a while Mum and Pat talked and reminisced and even spat hate against people like they used to. By the time we were fixing to leave Pat seemed to have sprung back to life and was as sprightly and as light as she ever was. She'd been granted one more day of health and spent it with the love of her life. 

Two weeks later, in the early morning, the city damp from overnight rain, the phone rang and it was Pat. She was panicked and scared and said that she had woke up and the entire right side of her body had turned dark brown and her liver was swollen like a football. She said she'd phoned an ambulance as she didn't want to wake Matt who had been working night shifts. Matt would not work that night. At just gone 3 PM Pat was pronounced dead and another little door was closed on history. My mother didn't cry, not openly anyway. She was just silent, thinking and knowing that her time, all our time, was coming very soon.

My Mother's Sex Life... Frigid

Oh what a surprise... an apology of sorts.

Please Excuse the delay in posting. Mother's been fucked ragged these last weeks and is in the recovery position. A girls gotta have a break... It can't be all fun, fun, fun...

A new post will be with you tomorrow... certainly... almost... maybe...

Shane. X

They appeared at the top of the road as if they had come from nowhere. Both men were thin, both medium height, and both were chortling out cold mist as they made their way down. From the distance they were at it was hard to see who was in front. They seemed to walk with some fatal force on them, coming together and veering across the pavement, shouting and pointing in each others face before staggering down towards us some more.

   > Yeah, that's them, said Mum, looks like they've come good for once.

As they came into view proper I watched them more closely. I was a little mystified as Mum had said they were identical twins, yet the two, now almost to us, couldn't have looked much more dissimilar.

Rodney, the oldest, the one in front, had short fine hair, a raw shaven face, and blood plump lips. He wore bleached jeans and an expensive puffy brown leather bomber jacket. Tattooed on his neck was a gliding swallow. Rather than give off the impression he was tough or free, it seemed to mark an incarcerated sadness within him. The other one, Andy, had no locked-up sorrow. He tottered along, a hit's length behind, his eyes closed and hands trembling, an open-temple of hurt and misery without the slightest attempt to conceal it. He had a wild uncontrollable perm, wore thin framed glasses, and sported a weeks old stubble with open itchy sores sat beneath it. His dress was a mis-match of gaudy sports wear, blue tracksuit bottoms tucked into his socks and an oversized skiing jacket with a large pink V across the front. The only real physical characteristics the twins seemed to share was the same thin, runny nose and a dense, apish skull, like something that would take a cricket bat quite well. Heroin addiction was another common charge.

   > By the state of ya shadow I take it ya got it done then? Said Mum, casting her eyes at Andy who was now stopped and stooped forward like an overhanging tree.

   > Course, darling, said Rodney, I told ya it'd be kosha.

Mum put her hand out and watched closely as Rodney counted notes into it. As he finished palming Mum the notes he started talking very quickly, saying he was late for an appointment he'd only just remembered about, creating a divergence. Without giving my mother a chance to speak he was edging his brother along and rushing him up.

   > Oi, and the fucking book! Said mum, waggling an index finger. Rodney gave a laugh and then handed the book over. He nudged his brother, making him stumble into a wall.

   > Wake up, bro, he said, get it together! 

 And that was that until the following week.

It was that Income Support book which first brought the twins into my mother's life. Mum had found it along the high-street but didn't know a post office that would cash the payments without ID. Asking around she was put onto the brothers who said they knew a place but it'd have to be a four way split. As there were three months of payments in the book Mum agreed, and each Tuesday she'd meet the twins along the neighbouring street, hand over the payment book and half an hour later she'd return to collect it back and receive her share of the spoils.

As Mum got to know The Twins better she started meeting them outside of payment days. She introduced them to the Black House and allowed them home to shoot heroin in her bedroom when my step-father wasn't there. It got to just about everyday the twins would come searching her, passing by out front to gauge the situation or chucking tiny pebbles up at her back bedroom window. Mum started hoarding their stolen goods and even got involved in other Post Office scams revolving around stolen payment books. Mum would go around cashing the smaller payments which required no ID. As long as you had a face that either looked honest or promised a blowjob the postal clerk would rubber stamp the crime and finger off the notes. For whichever reason, Mum never had a single payment refused.

Most evenings now The Twins climbed the stairs of our house and hurried sniveling and smelling of beer into Mum's bedroom. As Mum poured herself neat vodka the twins would sit on the floor and cook up their heroin or crush down pills to inject. It was an intense thing to watch, made even stranger by the mundane conversations The Twins kept going, speaking of everyday trivialities while performing such a taboo act.

Being addicts the twins would often finish bare-chested or dropping their trousers while searching out veins. There was always a lot of flesh and masculine smells on display. Mum sat on the bed and watched the Twins wildness with a weird kind of admiration in her regard. It's not easy to explain, but she seemed proud of them, as if their recklessness with heroin and needles somehow gave them the right qualities in other areas of their lives. Even I could sense the sexual thrill of young men, half-naked, uncaring, feral, their bodies lean and sculptured through a lifetime of running, not a spare ounce of fat anywhere, bruised and scarred, kissing needles and handing them back and forth. It wasn't long after that that my mother found excuse to remove her own clothes, returning from the toilet with her jeans unbuttoned, or changing into her short nightdress and slipping her knickers off as the boys sat on the floor cooking dope with a view of the false prophet between her legs. From there it was only a matter of time until one of The Twins progressed to the bed while the other took his shot; one twin fucking away as the other blew out his greatest veins; my mother getting off on something abstract, as neither of The Twins really had the slightest thing in the world to offer her.

Still, in a sense, there was at least some romance. There had been a gradual progression towards sex over weeks and not just a gangbang striking up out of nowhere. And the twins weren't nasty or violent or dangerous in the ways most of the men around the Black House were. The Twins' problem was that they were always together, and only very rarely was one without the other. The possibility of my mother separating one and having him to herself wasn't an option. It was both or none, not either/or.

In regards to that fierce loyalty the Twins had for each other, it made the fighting and arguing weirder still.  The Twins were always jostling and arguing. They would frequently square off and fight and attack each other. Between their four eyes at least one was always black. It wasn't so much that the twins despised one another, it was the more they despised the curse of seeing what they had each become reflected in the other. It was inescapable and went far deeper than the cosmetic changes they had made to look apart. They were indeed identical twins, something that became clearly obvious the more time spent around them once you could see past their haircuts, clothes and accessories to the replica shapes and features below – a grim mock of each other. So when Andy fucked my mother as Rodney shot smack on the floor, each caught glimpses of themselves in that moment, felt the tragedy and horror of their own lives, not even able to close their eyes on the way to ground. I suppose they were damned, together, caught in a wicked hall of mirrors.

My mother never had both brothers at once. She probably would have. Her previous wasn't too encouraging in that respect. I guess it was the Twins who weren't interested in that circus. So it was always one fucked or got pleasured while the other took care of his drug business or relaxed into it on the floor. Then they'd swap around, like lovers awkwardly changing positions. The closest it ever got to a ménage à trois was the three of them laying spent in the bed, my mother in the middle with a junkie twin to either side, curled up and drifting in their own moment of numb bliss, looking like a family who had been tenderly laid to rest together.

It was one day when we were alone, the summer having crept in and the house in light, that Mum said:

   > You know The Twins knew Puggy? They used to run together sometimes. Rodney described him down to a T... even remembered the old Breton t-shirt he always wore.

Puggy was my mother's great love, my father, a junkie who had been murdered some years before. I didn't reply. Mum seemed lost and sad, and in that moment I understood it all.

Mum ran with The Twins herself for some months and then the scams run out and I suppose the excitement of what was new and wild became everyday and as boring and straight as any other get-up. The twins stopped coming around as much and sometimes now mum would hide or send me down to tell them she wasn't in. So The Twins would then head to the Black House, pay their beer entry in, and spend their day dossed down there. But it wasn't easy for them. Due to their drug habits and their reputation for having light fingers, they were only just supported in the house. Not even arriving with huge cuts of expensive meat for the stew won them any friends. It remained an uneasy relationship, no one much seeming to like the brothers on the floor with the spoons. Even my mother during these times would cut a huge void between them, taking the side of the West Indian men as they joked and picked arguments with The Twins. And it was one such day which spelled the end of the twins stay.

Andy was on the floor cooking up a fix. As always he was carrying on with some casual talk, asking people about small things and making throwaway comments as he measured out his gear and water. Rodney was besides him, passing things over and commenting on how Andy was cooking the shot. he'd say things like: Enough bro! It's fucking evaporating! You don't need to cook it so long.

With Andy having sucked the shot up and now pushing the liquid up level in the spike, Lloyd kissed his teeth at him and mocked him. Andy, jokingly, called Lloyd a 'nigger'. Lloyd  laughed it off, said he was proud to be a 'nigger' then cursed Andy alluding to his pale white skin. Andy waved him away, this time labelling him a 'Black Cunt!' The moment he said it shadows passed across the sun and the room fell dark like a violent storm was on its way. Andy couldn't help but feel the tension as the cold weather front moved in. His reaction was to ignore it, hope it'd pass, as he poked around for a vein in his hand. 

   > You can call me NIGGER, you can call me BLACK BASTARD, but NO MAN call me BLACK CUNT! Spoke Lloyd with vicious retribution in his voice. From under the bed where he sat he reached  out a long handled demolition mallet and calmly walked towards Andy.

The first blow put Andy over on his back. He lay there choking from the force which had hit him in the chest. Lloyd raised the mallet above his head and brought it crashing down on Andy's chest again. Andy doubled up like a folded mattress, his glasses shooting off. Rodney scattered back. The mallet hit Andy again, making him convulse like he was being resuscitated. Then Lloyd began kicking, all over – vicious, ruthless boots turning Andy over onto his stomach. Somehow, through all this,  Andy had managed to keep hold of his needle. It seemed that was his ultimate struggle. Lloyd stopped kicking  and now towered over Andy, screaming, OUT!! OUT!!” Andy crept painfully towards the door, drops of blood marking his progression. He had difficulty crawling any faster as his right hand was still clutched, gripping the spike. Lloyd, through a thick mist of drunkenness, somehow spotted the needle and understood it was that which had kept Andy going. In his most vicious act of the assault Lloyd brought a hobnailed boot crushing down on Andy's hand, pinning it flat to the floor and bursting the fingers. He ground his heel in. Andy lost grip of the syringe, but still, even with his hand crushed and useless, tried to recover it. Lloyd brought his boot down on Andy's hand, once then twice more, then on the needle itself, shattering the white plunger. Andy gave up and crawled on, crying, without his fix, his hand dragging, making noises like a wild pig or something. Lloyd watched with fire eyes as he inched towards the exit.

Rodney, who had stayed well away from the fight now came to his brother's aid. Lloyd kissed his teeth in Rodney's face as he passed,  but let him help his brother - get him out the Black House. As Rodney came around to Andy he stooped and deftly picked up the needle, sliding it in his pocket. He consoled his brother, right close up, his nose to Andy's face, asking him questions, if he was Ok to move. Andy just nodded his head each time, whining. Rodney rushed and unlatched and opened the front door. Bright, fresh light swamped the Black House. Then, Rodney, the eldest twin, bent down and shuffled his younger brother up, gripping him around the back and under his armpit. he kinda ducked low so as Andy's arm with the crushed hand fell around his neck and dripped blood down the front of his jacket. And like that, Andy only just able to walk, looking like he'd been in a bomb blast, Rodney helped his brother out, and slowly, painfully, The twins, first and second, staggered away from the dirty war...

Before the sky was the roof. And in the roof, above the ceiling, amongst the pigeons, lived The Doc.

That was all I knew.

For a long time The Doc was something of a mysterious presence in the Black House. There was no description of him, no details, and no stories; just passing mention of his existence and a general concern for his well-being. The sole material evidence to support the talk that he was even up there in the attic was a drop down ladder hanging out the hallway ceiling, leading up into a square of dark. Apart from that The Doc was just a name, someone the new arrivals asked after, and those staggering out, with leaking sexual organs, would holler a drunken farewell to. It was a strange, revered status  The Doc held, something akin to a shaman, like he was a higher wisdom in contact with higher beings after having exiled himself due to some higher knowledge only he was privy to. From gleaming scraps of information from the daily references to him  I was able to fathom that he was: old, male, feeble, that he drank, and was not a doctor but a Murdoch: a one Murdoch Charles to be exact.

At that point in time, when we arrived in the Black House, The Doc had been up in the roof for eight years. In all that time it was said that not once had he ventured out and, apparently, only came down for a brief moment every few days. But he wasn't completely isolated. Each morning The Doc would send word down from his secret abode  nominating one of the female residents to shop and deliver his beer order for the day, and in the evening to run him up a helping of stew or whatever had been boiling away on the fire. It sounds a chore no one much would want, but to the contrary, The Doc's desired woman always appeared thrilled at being designated, some even squealing in delight when word arrived that she was The Chosen One. Indeed, there were even sentiments of jealousy and resentment if one woman was preferred too much over the others. And it was like that, how to me, as he'd become to everyone else, the elusive Doc felt like a very real and integral part of the Black House.

It was a bleak winter morning. Phantom winds howled and whistled about outside. In the Black House the fire was dead, just a pile of grey and white ash with burnt beer cans poking out. Although the windows were covered with newspapers and blankets, a cold, steely light got in and bleached the room in a harsh reality. The place felt open, broken. It was as if the windows were missing or the door had been left open or something. The thing which usually sealed the room, closed everyone in and made things intimate and final, was missing. The few drunks who were present seemed miserable, a slow creeping sobriety making them appear almost thoughtful. Lloyd sat on the bed and kept upending an already empty can of beer down his throat, and Bridget, behind him, was straightening out cigarette ends and lighting and smoking the tiny stubs. My mother sat across from me. She had a kind of weathered, commonplace love and care in her face, a kindness that sobriety afforded her and for moments at a time returned her back to me. She was with Vangine and it seemed the Doc wanted my mother to take his beer order for the day. Mum screwed her face up like she'd taken a spoon of something she didn't like. Vangine, a huge bustling West-Indian woman famous for laughing her huge boobs out her top, was whispering into Mum's ear, urging her to take The Doc's order. Finally my mother relented. As she left for the roof she looked at me and said: No Following!
I didn't. I sat where I was listening. I heard Mum climb the shaky steel ladder and curse as she clambered into the roof. Then I heard no more.

It was no more than ten minutes before Mum was back. She had the very first evil manifestations of alcohol consumption in her face. She gave a swing of her shoulders as she entered, a deliberate strut of self-satisfaction, her backbone straightened in pride or just a little more hardened to life.

> Come on, she said, waggling a finger. Up, you're coming with me.

I left with mum, me in baggy chewed clothes and her in a short skirt, bare legs to the elements, bruises on her thighs and shins, smoothing her hair down as we hurried off up the road. In the off-licence Mum told me to grab what I wanted. It was strange as we had no money and was the reason why the house had been so miserable that morning. I watched mum as she broke various beer cans free from their plastic rings, pointed out half bottles of spirits and ordered cigarettes and tobacco. I asked her where she had gotten money from. She looked at the Indian shop keeper, then at me, and then she said:

> Fuck, if I strained a shit out you'd wanna know what fucking colour it is!

I didn't ask again, but my eyes were on Mum, trying to figure out what the hell she was up to this time.

From that day on it was my mother exclusively who shopped The Doc's beer order, took him his food, and every two weeks went and cashed his sick money for him. Of course, it wasn't her choice. She just agreed. Ultimately it was The Doc who decided, and he decided upon her. As little as that seems to say about someone's desirability it was none the less flattering, being wanted over all others, and by virtue of being the 'chosen one' my mother leap-frogged the other women in the house and became something of a VIP.

Still, even now with my mother being a regular visitor to The Doc, talking of him as the others did, there were still no descriptions of him, nothing to give a sense of who this reclusive being was or why he kept himself up in the attic like that.

It was late one night, into the early hours, the fire just a deathly ember in the dark, that I caught my first fleeting glimpse of The Doc. I heard the metal ladder moving and then someone step lightly down into the hallway. I lay there on the floor, hush still, my eyes fixed open. In the dark of the room I could make out a few drunks strewn about unconscious, and far away, somewhere near the bed, a sole cigarette seared and burnt down in the night. All was quiet and low and dark. And then I saw it: a shape. It was so vague I first thought it was maybe just my eyes playing tricks. I squinted but could see nothing. Then I heard a rustling sound, a beer can being trod on, someone searching about, a sniffing nose, a foot pat down, more rustling... a scamper. Right past my face swept a pair of stick thin bony legs, and above my head a pair of long dangling bollocks passed by, followed by the acrid smell of stale shit. I lay there excited but burning up with fear. Once past me I could see more. The naked, lower half of an old black man, walking about in a loose night gown. I couldn't quite discern his features but could make out his silhouette, long dreadlocks hanging way down his back. Feeble but kinda sprightly this thing was rustling through the garbage and clothes which littered the floor. Occasionally one of the sleeping bums would stir or groan and the figure would freeze, wait, then scamper off to search some more. Then, for no clear reason, it let out a series of excited breaths before rushing off out the room and back down the hall.  I heard the ladder rattling and squeaking once more as The Doc returned to his dweling place in the roof. My eyes now accustomed to the dark I looked over to where Mum was, unconscious on her back, her face like a someone who'd died a painful death. The fire flared one last time and then died itself. Shadows fell into themselves. I was just a heartbeat in the dark.  I closed my eyes and went to sleep myself.

The next day I told mum what I had seen. She looked at me like I'd asked her permission for a glimpse into hell. I stared her out. Calmly, putting on an air of boredom, she said: 
> Yeah, that was Murdoch... The Doc. That's all ya need to know.

> I think he was robbing people, I said.

Mum gave a disgusted look. She circled her lips, then turned away as if deliberating whether to blow away another little part of my innocence or not. Looking over towards the papered windows, she said:

> Well no, smart arse, he wasn't stealing... he was looking for dirty knickers... Fucking sniffs 'em don't he! And don't ask me why... just don't!

I didn't. Instead I laughed. Ha, a knicker sniffer. I'd heard of such men but never thought they really existed. I also didn't realize it was a sexual thing, just found it bizarre that anyone would like the smell of old knickers, especially the kind you'd likely find in the Black House. Generally they were only ever changed if they'd been shit.

The Doc, once just a word, was now a creeping presence in the house. Knowing when he came out, and why, I'd lay in wait for him, trying to catch a glimpse of him, maybe see the  face this creature who now partly terrified me. Always late through the night; always half naked; always he'd come – a pair of thin bowed legs and swinging balls, scampering about in the dark, rushing off once he'd found his queer life force. But still, for all the nights I spied The Doc, I was still in the dark as to what he really looked like. There was a shape, a movement, a smell...c but no more. I was more than curious. And as Mum had stopped saying "no following!" I decided one morning that I would follow, that I too would visit The Doc.

From the main room I listened as my mother climbed the ladder and disappeared into the roof. After some minutes I too snook out and scaled the ladder up into the darkness...

 It was the smell which hit me first, smarted my eyes like my mother's peroxide hair bleach did. Standing in the entrance of the roof I looked around. It was dark, but not totally. I could just make out the intercrossing rafters and the floor beams. To my right was the wall of the side of the  building, and to my left, a little ways down, was a section of the roof thrown open in half light. It was a point to work towards. How The  Doc got up and down so easily was now a mystery as even I had trouble and had to stoop under the rafters while balancing myself along the tops of the beams. I crept towards the light, which I could now see was a little section of the roof partitioned off, fabrics hanging over the crossbeams so as to define a confined space. With each tentative step the horrendous smell in the roof became more piercing and apparent and the surroundings began to reveal themselves. Just about every beam was coated with a thick crust of pigeon shit,  small wispy feathers stuck and  sat everywhere, sometimes in little piles on the fireproofing. It was so bad that the particles in the air tickled and stuck in my throat. On reaching the partition I  could hear my mother's voice on the other side. She wasn't really speaking but making strange sounds. From the light  in what I took to be the Doc's room the attic was now clearly visible. Out in front of the made of space, the other side of the roof arch, were strewn and piled thousands of little tied bags of shit. The smell of excrement was atrocious. But not fresh excrement, this was stale excrement, like some kids whiff of in junior school. And it wasn't all neatly bagged either. There were free turds all around, sat shriveled on the dusty yellow insulation that filled the spaces between the floor beams; shit smeared thick up the beams and over the rafters – hand marks in it where you could see it had been wiped off. Now I baulked and checked where I put my hands to keep balance. That's when I stumbled and caught sight of mum, her hair and back, her upper clothes removed, sitting on a milk crate on the floor alongside a sordid shack of a bed. I made no attempt to hide myself. I was glad to have gatecrashed the party, hoping Mum would rush me off out of this place.

I came fully into the light. Mum saw me, but not before I saw the hideous mess of bones and filth and death that was The Doc. On a self-made bed, atop a pile of filthy rags and clothes, a man who looked like he was well into his second century lay on his back with his legs parted like a frog. I caught his face, nothing more than a skin covered skull, dark West African black, his head on a cushion of long serpent dreads, sickly yellow eyes with the rim of the irises cataract. Down below, nearest to me, his feet. The undersoles were filthy and crusted and his toe nails were two inches long and bright yellow with clusters of some weird fungal build-up all around. His thin, bow legs were dusty and scarred and covered in open pink welts which resembled sexual organs. Then there was the blond hair of my mother, now tossing back, revealing a white hand with painted nails holding onto an horrendously thin brown cock, glistening with saliva, a disgusting purple helmet peeping out the top.

Mum shot back, her mouth still shaped in the small '0' she had been sucking the Doc's cock with. The Doc's outstretched right hand was caught full of sloppy Irish tit. A cheesy, acrid, dairy smell now floated in the air. On the floor were more shit bags, unfolded soiled nappies and bottles and jars of dark yellow piss all piled up and sat around. The Doc's long yellow toe nails were the last things I saw before turning my back and scarpering, now not caring if I got my hands coated in excrement or not, breathing in the pigeon's dust and feathers as I hurried back into the black. 

Back down in the flat, amongst the early morning drunks, I sat waiting for Mum to come down in a mood after me, maybe even belt me. But she never did. She returned after her usual twenty minutes with cash for The Doc's booze and, as usual, money for herself. She shot me a mean look, then put her coat on and hurried off out. .

So, it's sex again, I thought. It always is. Men don't pay women to go to the shops and they certainly don't care who goes for them. And neither was it desirability that my mother was showing at being The Chosen One, rather she was squirming with the joy of a lucky break and the thought that she'd made it, that she could chemically chase away the winter's cold a little easier than yesterday. As for The Doc, he was revered for his money and nothing else. An old miser, he had been hoarding away pennies and pounds for the last ten years and now had a little saving that would barely pay three months rent in the real world, but here, in this Other World, relative to the absolute nothing that everybody else had, he was the Black House's most eligible bachelor. To get a little of what The Doc had people would do just about anything. So, in a way, he was a shaman... a witch-doctor – for in sober days he could conjure up spirits, and as long as he was safe and happy and alive, the Black House would be healthy too.

Unfortunately The Doc wasn't happy and alive for too much longer. He was indeed ill: stomach cancer. Refusing any medical help The Doc sat out his illness alone, still refusing to come down even when he could no longer get out of bed. So one afternoon, in the freezing month of February, four of the men went up and got him. They carried him down with all the pomp and respect he was owed, and sat him in the big comfortable armchair over by the fire. He sat there like that, rotting away in silence, for almost three months. By that time he was way past wanting or needing any sexual relief. He was so ill that all he could do was drink, smoke and occasionally eat. When he was finally too weak to even do that himself, Vangine, the only woman he'd never chosen to take his beer order, nursed and took care of him, pouring liquor down his throat when he wanted it and force feeding him mashed stew when he would take it. And like that, refusing all medical help and wallowing in pain, The Doc wasted away before us, slowly sinking lower into his chair and shrinking into his own filth. The smell was appalling, like an old scabby dog curled up with an arse full of dribbling ulcers. Though, like everything, we got used to it, became desensitized, until finally shit didn't smell at all. And then one morning I woke up and the Doc was staring straight at me, as if he finally recognized I was the boy who'd disturbed him in the roof: he was dead, just a reflection in his eyes of the future to come.

After the paramedics  had taken what was left of the Doc's body away all that remained was the rotting, decomposing armchair he had died in. It  was burnt right through to the springs by all the acidic bodily fluids The Doc had expelled. The men pushed the chair out, carried it downstairs and dumped it out along the big steel communal bins. For weeks it remained there, eaten through and stained black by death, a reminder to everyone of certain dark nights in a certain Black House with death wincing away through the night.

Above the ceiling, after the roof, is the sky. And in the sky, past the pigeons, nothing stretches on forever...

Some men are wild and dangerous and untamed by life's beating. You can spot such men miles away. They have a look, something distant and animal in the eyes, something that lacks reason or emotion or knowledge of consequence. They snarl and lash out at pain rather than learn to cower from it. Such men cannot be governed with Good Boy Drops, and if they do ever tow the line it is never in defeat but through craftiness and cunning. Such men live in a state or permanent violence, the capability of it wriggling through their skin and movements and words. They are men who become dominant without making any attempt to be so. They over-power and strike fear into others with nothing more than their presence of being. They are men capable of honest murder. Lloyd, a tall, lean, scarred and violent Jamaican drunk, beaten like an animal for the first fifteen years of life, was one such man.

My mother met Lloyd in a filthy drinking den in West London called The Blackhouse. Lloyd was shacked up there with a half-crazed Northern Irish drunk called Bridget. The two ran the house, a place without gas, electricity, or hot water, renting out floor space for beer to local dossers and junkies. The group, some days twenty strong, lived in the single main room, flopped out on old sofas, in rotting armchairs, or on cushions on the floor, with Lloyd and Bridget sharing a decomposing bed up against the near end wall. The room was permanently in darkness, the only light coming from the makeshift fire in the old grate, kept going with anything that would burn, the smoke and fumes snowing down and covering everything in a thick layer of black soot.

At 40 years old Lloyd had been hardened and sculpted by a savage existence . Unwashed in years, marinated in piss and sweat, tribal marks across his cheeks, his body tagged and scarred like a lover's tree, he spent his days sat on the edge of the bed, drinking and smoking, the orange flares from the fire lighting up glimpses of his foreboding presence, brooding in the dark of his own shadow. His dress was meagre, a filthy string vest and a pair of soiled grey suit pants, the leg swinging a good inch above his ankle, the waist flush to his firm stomach, the zipper broken giving sight, now and again, of his large limp cock which he'd whip at out at turns and fill cartons and bottles with urine. Lloyd was the first of my mother's lovers who taught me that there were reasons other than love or lust why two people may shack up together, that cosmopolitan hadn't won outright. That sometimes, still, sexual partners are chosen on a more base level, the match up not always coming down to external or even internal beauty. But I only understood that years later. At the time, I couldn't for my life fathom why my mother would give herself to such a flayed and cross-hatched soul as he.

There were three important events which led to the announcement of my mother's affair with Lloyd, and their subsequent running away together. The first was Lloyd one evening boasting:

> My Wood's as long and as thick as a can of Special Brew!

The other West-Indian drunks hissed and cacked laughter, strange shapes sprawled around helpless in the firelight. My mother didn't laugh. Rather she kinda stifled a giggle, and in a drunk voice,barely audible, somewhere between sarcasm and admiration, she said:

> Yeah, alright Lloyd... I'd have to see that one to believe it, eh!

The second stirring of a great change was when Lloyd one day pulled the blankets back on Bridget, revealing a bruised and wasted sack of human bones, deathly white and soiled through, her anorexic legs splayed by drunkenness and serial rape, her cunt a black hole of stench and filth, teeming with life.

> Dis Irish pussy is rank, he said. She no good no more. NO GOOD NO MORE! If you want a little Wardog come and take some scraps! Lloyd sucked his lips and flicked a hand out in disgust. Wardog, his erect cock poking out the fly of his pants, crawled in the bed and on top of Bridget. There was no struggle, no words, just Wardog moving about and Lloyd, his head cocked back, laughing and gargling throatfuls of extra strong beer. Up until then no man could or would have touched Lloyd's woman. It was a no go hole; something Lloyd guarded over with murderous protection. But Lloyd had eyes in another direction: my mother, and she wasn't missing a beat.

The final thing to pass was a repetition of the first, Lloyd exclaiming again how his cock was as thick and as long as a can of Brew. This time my mother remained quiet. Not a peep. She lowered her head and sat there with the shy, embarrassed smirk of a school girl, the spotlight of silence lighting her up. I knew then, everyone knew, she had fucked Lloyd. That same night my mother encroached further on Bridget's man, joining the squalor of the bed, the three of them sleeping and living in it together, being perfumed by a common stench.

In the gloomy, dustbeam days of The Blackhouse, Mum would now sit, cross-legged, on the edge of the bed, alongside Lloyd, no tights or underwear, Lloyds left hand never much coming out from under her short skirt. Bridget lay behind, wrapped up in a mound of filthy blankets, drinking away with dirty tears leaking out and curling around her ears. No matter the drunk she was, she still suffered the pain of losing someone, of coming around to pangs of loneliness and tears in the moments between oblivion. It was a bizarre thing, Bridget, somehow terrified of my mother yet fearless of Lloyd, instinctively hissing insults at him as she made her brief cameos from unconsciousness. More often than not Lloyd would help her back to nowhere with a vicious backhander. From that point on Lloyd was with my mother and Bridget became a kind of living fuck hole for all and sundry... a place for every dosser to unload into, whenever and however they pleased.

It was not long after that, that one day my mother turned on Bridget and slapped her one in the mouth. Bridget, a woman kicked and beaten through a thousand loves, broke down and bawled like a lifetime of hurt was pouring out of her. It was as if she had finally gave up. That slap seemed to knock her entire metabolism into freefall. In the course of a week she underwent startling physical changes: aging beyond her years; losing her teeth; her hair thinning and turning grey; the skin on her face sagging away from the bone. She became feeble and weak, and if she was already a chronic alcoholic now she was bed-ridden too, not rising for the last few months we were present in the Blackhouse.

But the end of the Blackhouse wasn't the end of my mother and Lloyd. It was the prologue to what was to come. Everyone knew it, but somehow my mother couldn't see, that how we left Bridget is how she would become. So, in one of my mother's most incomprehensible decisions, she went solo with Lloyd, moving into a hell hole of drink and poverty in London's Elephant & Castle.

As Mum stuffed bin-liners full of clothes and shoes, and Lloyd took them downtairs and dumped them into a supermarket trolley, I understood a little of what mum saw in him, why it had come to this. It was a progression – the ultimate battered woman's trap: for my mother to have a lover, one she could have around the house, could walk the streets freely with, could advertise to the world, he needed to be stronger and meaner than the threat she was leaving behind. I saw it that day, my step-father, a man of purported violence himself, hiding out downstairs, afraid, as Lloyd strolled through his house, sucking his teeth, a black psychotic history of hate and violence, all too ready to unload. With him my mother could live without fear of reprisals; woman of the most savage man in town. Only, of course, it wasn't any kind of real freedom at all, she had done nothing more than move into an even stricter, tougher prison.

I don't know the full hell of which my mother lived that year of her life but I know it was hell. It was a time of horrendous sexual and physical abuse. She was locked naked in a first floor flat, supplied with gallons of extra strong beer and vodka, and when Lloyd wasn't there was guarded over by another man. For eight months she lived like that, until one day, during a visit to the unemployment office after her welfare never arrived, she slipped to freedom leaving Lloyd high and dry – without drink nor fuck and just himself for consolation. Home alone from school there was a buzzing and hammering on the front door. Peeping from the upstairs window I saw someone vaguely familiar standing down in the yard. It was a woman with medium length, greasy blond hair, a swollen misshapen face, dressed up like a whore and screeching in Jamaican patois. I stared in disbelief, something forgotten registering in me. Somehow, by instinct or luck, she stepped back and looked up, her sad, drunk eyes finding mine.

> Shane, it's me, she screeched, Mum! Let me in... QUICK! I've left that cunt and he'll be around 'ere any minute. He's gonna fucking kill me!

Lloyd never did show up that day, nor the next, or the next. After a week my mother's swollen face had gone down and she was back to something of the woman I remembered. Then, after a moment of calm, she became restless once more, drinking herself silly and spending her time looking out the back window, pissed off at something, drunk and nodding away with a menacing look about her. Then she was gone. Willingly, for whatever reason, she'd left to return to Lloyd, to take her beating and live another bout of booze and violence.

The second time she escaped from Lloyd it was serious. She'd jumped out from a first floor window after Lloyd had found out she'd been fucking the man guarding over her. He, Jacob, had fled for his life, leaving mum to take a whirlwind of violence which passed by in a deluge of fists and boots. It culminated in a full can of beer being hurled in her face, cracking her cheekbone and splitting her left ear in two. Locked in the bathroom she somehow squeezed out the small top window and dropped to freedom, scrambling off to A&E where the doctors initially thought she had suffered a fractured skull. In fear of her life, scared Lloyd would somehow track her down, my mother snuck out the hospital after being treated and bedded, and made her way home. She arrived late that night, her blond hair caked in dried blood, no make-up, no tights, no shoes, and the entire left side of her body kicked into the colours of a beautiful autumn. She could barely move. For two days she hardly spoke a word, just drank neat vodka to dull the pain and hid out in the back room, constantly asking if the front door was double bolted. But again, Lloyd never came looking.

When mum recovered she told me about Jacob, a Nigerian lodger charged with preventing her escape. He did that pretty well, but unfortunately for Lloyd the two fell for each other and began fucking right under his nose. But it wasn't that which was my mother's great fear, she'd already taken the beating for that crime. Rather, it was Lloyd's boast: No woman leave Lloyd three times! And he meant it. This was my mother's second time, and we all knew she'd end up dead if she ever went back for another round. As drunk and as stupid as she was, she never did.

It was some months later when mum came back from the off-licence, stuck her head in the door, and said:

> Er, there's someone 'ere to see ya!

I looked out the door, and there, to my horror, was Lloyd. He was once again living in the Blackhouse, back together with Bridget, and had invited Mum around to drink as if none of the past year had ever happened. It was weird sitting around there. Lloyd back in the bed with Bridget, Mum back in the chair across from them, from where it had all started, giggling at his boasts which were the only jokes he had. For anyone entering the house there was no hint of the history which had unfolded between them; between anyone.

Little did anyone know at the time but this was the tail-end of the Blackhouse and the end of Lloyd and Bridget. Three months later Lloyd was arrested for the attempted murder of a junkie named Rodney (one of my mother's multiple lovers from that period). Lloyd had put his chest through with a mallet after Rodney had called him a 'black cunt'. Found not guilty, Lloyd was set free to unleash his violence one last time, beating Bridget to death in a frenzied attack over nothing anyone present understood. At the age of 43, Bridget, mother of two, suffered a fatal stroke while being relentlessly punched and kicked. This time Lloyd was charged with manslaughter and taken away. He was sentenced to an unspecified amount of time in a psychiatric hospital. Just over four years later he was judged 'cured' and set free. In that freedom we never saw or heard from him. At first there were apparent sightings of him, and then the myths and rumours started up. But whatever the truth,  Lloyd was never of the flesh, just a vexed, psychotic, soul in time, as much a victim of history and circumstance as anybody else...