10. A fool in need of a folly
10. A fool in need of a folly
April (part one)
This is part ten. You can find part one here. It’s probably worth it.
Last time: Foreign supermarkets, male friendships, superior doritos, bad cigarettes.
1.
The flat is on the top floor of a crumbling Edwardian block fifty yards from the beach. If I were able to stand on the sagging balcony, I’d be party to poetic sunsets and vast slices of the North Sea, but I can’t. The walls stand scarred by furniture and fists. The kitchen cabinets have stab marks. The carpet is decent. But the lights don’t work. The power comes and goes with the wind, the windows aren’t weather tight and the front door is missing. I fashion something temporary out of cardboard and duct tape. It won’t stop a determined breeze, but it doesn’t much matter. I have moved eight times in two years. Flat shares, family homes, studios. I didn’t own the flat with the stoop outside. I didn’t own the attic. But this is mine. I own the cracks in the plaster and the bad water pressure. I own the bird shit and the damp stains. I own the deliriously high ceilings that will host breath taking bookshelves someday. I bought the lot, sight unseen, for five British pounds. Foolish, reckless even. But it’s a day for fools, and I am a fool in need of a folly.
2.
There’s a reason the flat cost five pounds. My parents thought this was a bad idea. My friend V worried it might be too soon. Brandon said, Oh hell yeah. I was excited. Then I woke up this morning and in the damp cold of day saw the state of the place with sober eyes and realised what a fuck ton of work this was going to be. The flat needs so much doing to it that I’ve so far felt forced, as a result, to do nothing. Here on the coast, tucked out of sight, with no-one keeping me honest, I could see fit to keep doing nothing. To fix nothing, to find nothing. To binge watch and binge eat and melt into the sofa. And no-one would be any the wiser.
3.
The ghosts visit in various ways. The lights flicker, they move things, they bang pipes in the night and make the taps run brown. And they write LONDON CUNT in red marker on the wall, along with a dick-and-balls and a dotted line that suggests a person who comes in staccato. As I paint it over with the ageing contents of a can of off-white paint I found in a cupboard, it occurs to me that the latter might have more to do with the fact the cardboard door is nowhere to be found, and that people here don’t seem to much enjoy the invading Londoners, with their big ideas of regenerating the area and making it a nice place to be. It’s a shame whoever did this didn’t ask, because if they had they’d know I’m not from London. Beside the point, perhaps. But they’d also know that as of this morning I had no intention of improving the place. Now I’ve started I might as well finish. I remove the kitchen door, and with a little wrangling involving a hammer and a few choice words, manage to make it fit the front doorway.
4.
I’m not sure at what point disrepair becomes dereliction, but I’m sure at what point you call in the cavalry, and that’s when great columns of render peel from the walls and try to kill you while you sleep.
5.
I haven’t left the house in five days except to buy groceries from the petrol station each morning at five a.m., when the drug addicts and alcoholics who roam the streets of Seagate are changing shifts. In a fit of self-care I open the French windows and step out onto the balcony I’m not supposed to use. Turns out five pounds buys a lot of view in Seagate. To my left, terraced tenement buildings straddle either side of my road and every road after that. Yawning spires and oak trees stretch out of the fog, birds flocking both. Further still: Clock towers and high-rises and a stalled Ferris wheel. To my right, cake, icing, and cherry: the North Sea, in all its murky majesty, sea foam and smog melting together into the distance. The reason I can afford this view is that the cash-poor local council had the idea to take housing repossessed from scum landlords and heir-less estates and sell it cheap to burned out artists. In return, the homes would be occupied and renovated and the town flooded with creativity and commerce. By the looks of it, the expected influx of creative capital has so far done little for the local economy. Empty buildings, damaged roofs, gardens filled with abandoned white goods. I’m reminded of the sign visible from the train as it pulls into the station at Seagate, the first thing that greets you when you arrive: Welcome to Fantasyland, it says.
6.
My dad, bless him, arrived during my midday nap and in his wisdom decided to carry up the stairs a small sofa and a dining set he sourced for me. The cavalry. He is in his seventies and doesn’t seem to understand why I’m annoyed he did it by himself. He also doesn’t understand why I wasn’t awake to help him, nor why the kettle isn’t already on. He’s currently trying to fix the tap. Make yourself useful, he says. He nods toward a mug he brought with him. I wade into the pile of stuff sitting unpacked in the living room and find the kettle. He’s also brought his own tea bags and his own milk. I crack open a can of coffee I bought at the petrol station, and we sit on the kind of sturdy plastic boxes dads seem to have shares in. I apologise for the state of the place, but he waves me off. It’s alright this, he says. Your mum might have preferred if it were closer to home, but it’s alright. Invoking my mum is one of the ways he launders his emotions. Dad, I say, this is home. He takes a bite of a biscuit he brought with him, then asks if there’s a hardware store nearby. I ask why. Well, he says, if this is home, we should probably buy you a door.
7.
When I wake up dad is bleeding a radiator between sips of tea. Physical labour is the other way he launders emotions. He’ll fix whatever you want, he’ll help you move house, but don’t ask him for a hug. The best way to describe him is he’s a sitcom dad. Think Al Bundy. Homer Simpson. Uncle Phil1. He’s a creature of routine, quick to anger, with a knack for repeating the same three anecdotes and coming through in a pinch. He has a suite of popular catchphrases and likes to do a serious talk once an episode. I’m standing witless in my boxers when he decides that it’s time for this episode’s serious talk. Are you going to see this through? he asks. And then: Your track record isn’t great. My dad. Bless him. He goes back to bleeding the radiator. Black water spills into a bucket. Make yourself useful, he says, poking at an adjustable spanner just out of reach. I hand it to him. Thank you, he says. That’s what you say when someone does something nice. I offer him a refill on his tea, which I’m contractually obliged to do, and which he’s contractually obliged to accept. Thank you, I say. For coming to help. He takes a sip of tea. See? he says. Easy isn’t it. I pass him the rag he’s pointing to and remind him that making things difficult is my role on the show. It’s how I’m written. He tinkers with washers and valves, chuckling to himself. Rocket science is difficult, he says. You’re plain hard work. He stands up and crosses radiator off his list. We spend the rest of the day not really speaking, mending everything else instead.
8.
Over a curry my dad asks how I intend to support myself. Writing isn’t exactly keeping the lights on, he says. And we can’t bankroll this chapter. He’s never really understood writing. Why do something so time consuming for so little return. He’s not entirely wrong. Thought I’d do some tasteful nudes, I say. A hint of bush maybe. A suggestion of bollock. He tilts his glasses down and gives me the look. Anyone who has seen a sitcom knows this look. It’s a moment canned audiences go wild for. A regular laugh track riot. Don’t be a dickhead your whole life, he says. I’m caught between fighting and eating. I don’t have the stomach for either. I push my plate aside. You know what your problem is, he says. He leans over to mop my plate with a naan. Your eyes have always been bigger than your belly. The live studio audience whoops and howls.
9.
Dad leaves the way he arrived: quietly, without physical contact. In his wake the flat seems to lower its shoulders a little, settle on its bricks. There is a note on the fridge: Make yourself useful. It’s my dad’s handwriting. Must be where I picked up the habit.
10.
I have watched four seasons of Mad Men and opened a hundred browser tabs of power tool reviews and pornography, and with few remaining distractions that aren’t unpacking, and because I’ve had a headache for five days, I decide to venture out. The coastal walks were what appealed most about moving here; and the fact I had nowhere else to go. But to see it at first light is something unexpected. The bluster and bustle of the wind gives way to aching blues of sea and sky so beautiful I wish I knew how to paint. It’s as if by contrast the town gave up trying to compete and settled instead for ruin. Among other derelictions, Seagate is home to the decaying former site of the UK’s largest seaside resort, Fantasyland. The name is wrought in crumbling iron over the chain-locked gates. It is unclear when they were last opened. The main strip continues the theme. A row of anaemic amusement arcades and empty-looking escape rooms and a dozen shuttered storefronts. Sea air might work wonders for the senses, but it wreaks havoc on the fixtures. Wood, metal, paint. It was all long ago left to the sea. I decide I have ventured far enough from home and turn to find a fading sign hung forty feet high across the side of a concrete car park, the colours sun-bleached, the words washed out. Someone once said relatability is the only true measure of art these days, and there is something in the failed promise of this message, something in naked ruin of it, that I fall quite in love with: Welcome to Fantasyland, it says.
The sitcom dad peaked in 1992. Tim Allen’s Home Improvement, which began airing in 1991, signalled a swift decline into sitcom dad mediocrity – all catch phrase, no heart. There was a mild resurgence of the classic silhouette in 1998 with That 70s Show’s Red Foreman, but like most sitcom output of recent decades, Red was something of a reheated TV dinner.