Jimmy Andrex

Mind the Gap Jimmy Andrex

Kings Cross Station Concourse. 11.53pm. June 17th 1982.

'Sir, thank you kindly for being the only businessman smiling on Kings Cross station today, thank you for not spitting all over me or telling me to go away, thank you kindly for not looking down on me, I’ll get right down on my hands and knees if I need to, cos I need a few p for a drink or something to eat to keep the cold from snapping round my ankles, or licking my cheeks or getting a wet nose when I breathe

Thank you, sir, it’s what Jesus would have done, sir; not a businessman, sir? You’re obviously a secret millionaire. Let me shake your hand, sir, it’s what Jesus would have done, sir, let me shake your hand again, sir, you’re obviously a secret millionaire.'

'Fuck me, I thought I’d never get past him, good job I had 50p,' I gasped to the curly blond lass across the aisle in tweeds and herringbone cap sprawled amidst her luggage like a magazine spread. I, by contrast, looked like I’d been dressed by my enemies and given a kicking by Millwall supporters.

The desperate, forty minute assault course from Heathrow to Kings Cross via the Tube, carrying two enormous nylon holdalls with tourniquet handles, containing three months’ luggage and an ill-advised purchase of all four-volumes of the Diccionario del Uso Español had left me sweating like kebab meat on a spit.

As I lobbed my bags, dictionaries and finally my panting body through the open door of the moving train, it had gone through my mind that this was the sort of excitement that usually only happened in films, which made the barrage of swearing and whistling from both guards and the realistic possibility of life-changing injury fade compared to the scene as I thought I would write it down years later.

Of course, I never did.

As I slumped down onto my pile of crap and never to be used reference materials, for some reason I couldn’t get the barking vowels of Paul Weller out of my head.

The last thing I saw As I lay on the floor Was JESUS SAVES Painted by an atheist nutter…

'Where you been with all that?'

'Sevilla' 'Where?'

'Uh…oh, Seville. Sorry, I’m a languages student.'

Wanker, who you trying to impress? This isn’t some Holy Shit! American girl in the Plaza de Espana who would be impressed (a) if you said bloke (b) you’re really ENGLIIISH?? or (c) unlike her, you can speak a version of Spanish comprehensible to Spaniards. No, matey boy, you’re back on the 11.55 Kings Cross to Leeds Trainof-the-living-dead trundling through the night stopping absolutely every-fuckingwhere dropping off the mail. Most of those who’ve thereby avoided a night wandering the streets of London’s U-Bend are now drifting into unconsciousness in a scene resembling an avant-garde Swedish film where everything smells of ashtrays.

'Oh really? I’ve just been to my dad’s in France.'

'Have you? Whereabouts?'

'He lives in a gite in the Dourdogne with my step-mum. My mum lives in Harrogate.

I’m doing architecture at St Andrews.'

'The Dourdogne? I’ve never been there. I had to do three months in Toulouse, but I never really went anywhere else ‘cos I were always skint. You heading for Harrogate or Edinburgh?'

'Neither. I’m meeting some friends just outside Sheffield and we’re spending a few days at this fahking amayyzing house in the Lake District, just near Grasmere. '

'Oh.'

I paused to wriggle my fingers to ease the pins and needles which signaled the return of blood after the chafing they’d had from the bag handles. I was also a sucker for upmarket pit-talk.

'Just outside Sheffield, you say?'

'Yeah. There’s a place this train stops for ages. I’ve arranged to jump out there. It’s dead safe. They’re waiting for me in the car.'

I glanced up at the scarred diagram of the Inter City network. London; so large it didn’t even need a blob or station names. A dirty shithole maybe, but where stuff happened. Stuff on the telly. Stuff in the NME. Stuff on the news.

Then I followed the blue line with its white circle stations up the East Coast mainline like a catechism: Stevenage, Peterborough, Grantham, Newark Northgate, Retford, Doncaster, Wakefield Westgate, Leeds.

'But this train doesn’t go through Sheffield, does it?'

'Haven’t you used it before? It wanders about all over dropping off the mail. There’s loads of places it just sits in sidings for ages.'

I had, but I was always so knackered that I’d spend most of the journey asleep or peering into the dark trying to work out where we were. How did some people just know these things?

'Where are you getting off?'

'Wakefield Westgate.'

I could see its white blob on the map which looked like an old man sitting down.

Wakefield Westgate was somewhere around the shoulderblades. Glasgow Central was the mouth, Bristol Temple Meads the kneecap, Liverpool Lime Street the cupped hands. London was where the rectum should be, but, once this defiant regional observation had lost its piss-pride, another picture from a year before flashed up before the next words out of my mouth.

For three weeks under the Ninety-Nine Arches I’d been dressing a wall at the rope factory a spit out the window from trains heading south from Wakefield Westgate.

For the uninitiated, dressing, though it sounds like some arcane skill practised high in the vaulted eaves of medieval cathedrals, actually involved me chopping out every last chunk of mortar from a three hundred yard wall with a brickhammer so it could be repointed and I could afford to do my three months in France that summer.

Recoiling from broadsides of flying cement chips, I’d look up and see people heading out of Westgate towards Kings Cross. I’d wonder where they were off and who might they meet and why were they going and assume it was a sight more interesting than this bastard wall. I wanted to be on that train and feel my feet quickening again along the platform’s filth in the urinal that was Kings Cross station. Always, I imagined it would be more exciting than Wakefield.

'Where’s Wakefield?'

I was used to it, but my heart still sank.

'Just south of Leeds. The trains all stop there.'

'It sounds fahhking Dullsville!'

'It is a bit.' Well, if you can’t beat ‘em.

'Which uni do you go to?'

'Liverpool.'

'Oh wowwwwww! That’s sooo cool! I love Echo and the Bunnymen. Have you seen them live?'

'No, they don’t play Liverpool much lately, they’ve got too big. I missed their thing in Sefton Park this summer ‘cos I was away.'

There. Just enough to sound clued up, not too much as to confess I didn’t really like them and was still attached to the wailing Ayn Rand bollocks of my Rush albums.

Even as I said it I was asking myself whether or not I could be bothered to make an effort here.

'I’ve not been to Liverpool. What other bands are there?'

I decided against Bernie Torme’s sweaty metal widdling, she’d washed recently so that ruled out The Enid and the exotic whiff of what passed up Westgate for sophistication stopped me mentioning I’d actually seen chunky-knit pop mayflies Haircut 100 in the student union on the strength of them being in my mate’s Face magazine. However, the fact that she appeared to be a distant relative of Rupert the Bear compared favourably with the last lass I’d tried to chat up whose main selling point, she insisted, was her ability to spin a lit cigarette round on her outstretched tongue. In a bus shelter.

'I saw the Pale Fountains at Pickwicks before I left. They were alright.'

So off we went, the conversation lumbering North towards familiar territory, and even though it never happened, I wondered at the time as to why we bother going through the motions even if only out of curiosity and no-stone-left-unturned male diligence.

My problem, I worked out thirty years later, was that, even by the age of five or six, something nagged at you that there had to be more to life than the world before your eyes, even though you seemed perfectly content. It nagged at you as Long Tall Pete, who’d bought a new car three weeks after being elected to t’club committee, lolled past your gate every Sunday around three, when the Jolly Miller shut and he went home expecting his roast dinner. It nagged at you every time some kid gave you a battering and you didn’t even know who they were. It nagged at you when your sister raved about Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop when all you could see was a squeaky blonde woman with a sock on her hand. It nagged at you when you watched the telly till it went off.

A whole world existed somewhere else, and the further it was, the better. It had to be. In Beat Novels, hipsters jumped onto slow-moving freight trains and headed for California. Try that round Wakefield and you ended up at Eggborough Power Station covered in coal dust.

The only place you knew that might take you there was the grey-brick bursting cyst oozing out of a crumbling Victorian station building whose clock tower had long since lost its clock. The birds you could see flocking around Pugneys lake every September as you headed across the Calder all knew it too.

Of course, I wasn’t to know how it would end.

By the point where conversation had reached a place where a bright light escaped from behind a slag heap, like two ying and yang cones in the black mist, my dreamscape of promise had expanded to include Harrogate, St Andrews and architects, even though her vowels got on my tits.

'This is where I get off in a minute. It’ll stop soon.'

And, just as she’d said it, it did. How come some people know this stuff?

'You know what, you should come with us. You’d like it. My friends would like you. I love your accent. It’s cute.'

At this point, my head went quiet like the noise of someone switching off the power on the dodgems, leaving only the idling thrum of the diesel a hundred yards up the track from our carriage. Nobody, and I mean nobody, finds the nasal death rattle whine of the West Riding appealing. Even I hate it and I’m stuck with it.

'Seriously?'

She had to be taking the piss. I didn’t think our routine exchange of personal details laced with an idiot’s guide to early 80’s indie had gone that well.

'Don’t get any funny ideas, though. It’d be fun for a few days. Come on. Your town sounds sooooo bohhhring!'

I bridled, but when I tried to think of reasons why, a video played of me spilling my drink in Casanova’s when the couple next to me got so into him putting his hand up her dress that her head snapped back and hit me in the temple. Another showed me playing endless games of round-the-clock-in-doubles darts in my mum’s kitchen.

One was me just drifting round a frosty town centre. Then again, I had no idea who this was or where I’d end up. I knew, however, where I’d end up if I stayed on the train.

Was it Wakefield or was it me?

Across from me, she was gathering up her luggage.

'They’re here.' Car headlights flashed. 'You coming?'

Three days earlier, I’d turned down a similar offer to go to Madrid from a Spanish woman I’d been tutoring, mainly through having a plane to catch, but in truth, though I really wanted to see Madrid, it scared me to death. I never went.

She opened the window to release the door catch, lobbed down her stuff and hopped down. My dad used to do it when he came back from National Service, he’d often told me how it was done.

I was standing with my bags in my hand at the open door.

'Here, throw them down!'

I looked towards the waiting car, but noticed that behind it, the sky had just started to go from black to pre-sunrise silver. The air felt fresh through my nostrils.

The train gave a jolt and creaked into life.

'Come on, it’s OK, I’ve done it lots of times.'

She had really nice teeth.

The ground began crawling past like a conveyor belt and I was still.

Staring at it, watching it slide away.