Psychopaths and a butterfly, and a nice cup of tea

It was something of a coincidence when a few years ago I was at a party in Bath and met the daughter of John and Anna Carter, founders of Carter’s Steam Fair in London where I once worked for a day and where my uncle ran candyfloss stalls laundering cash generated by his narcotics operations. Another coincidence, albeit entirely separate and connected in no way whatsoever to this, is that I have lived in both St Andrews in Bristol and St Andrews in Scotland.
And so, anyway...
Soon after my A-Levels I found myself being rather bored. I was living close enough to Frome for this to be sufficient a reason, and I had a year to kill prior to departing for university to become even more bored than ever before, particularly throughout the two-hour stratigraphy lectures at 9am on Monday mornings. I decided to move to Bristol and pass the year with a job or two, hopefully raising some cash to take to said university and squander on booze and stuff. I took a room in the house my mother shared with her partner, Mark. My sister stayed there too for a bit. I was nineteen years old.
Living in Bristol was my first ever experience of life as a city-dweller. I’d visited the place many a time before, and Bath too, but it was the first time I’d lived in a place so vast and full of concrete and fly posters and dirt. Sure, it wouldn’t be the last time I’d ever live in such a place, but it was certainly the first. It was an interesting experience; one that would become rather more memorable as a consequence of attracting the unwelcome attentions of a psychopath. Actually, come to think of it, I’m really not altogether sure whether there ever is a welcoming occasion for that. We lived in North Road in St Andrews (the Bristol one), an area of the city some way ‘up’ the Gloucester Road and off to the right.
If you don’t already know, Gloucester Road is a part of the city that some may describe as ‘artisan’ while others’ as somewhat ‘bohemian’. I tend to stick with the simplicity of ‘grotty’. It stretches from the centre of Bristol up towards the M5 motorway, but at various stages, for reasons that I have little interest in going into, it’s called something else. A couple of miles or so out of town in an area named Horfield is a prison. I’d rather not ever have a reason to describe that.
Back then, as I imagine is the case even now, Gloucester Road featured an abundance of charity shops. Many regular retailers had long since gone out of business and their graffiti-daubed roller-shutters then served to display day-glow fly posters and to highlight the purposelessness of illiterate chavs. There were a number of cafés along the road and some offered al-fresco slurping of caffeine-related beverages; places for customers to inhale exhaust fumes and grime while relaxing out on the pavement. A few offered fairly reasonable plates of egg and pig-bits and there were any number of old pubs where the music would stop and the regular customers would turn and stare as you entered through the door.
North Road was perhaps a mile or so from the city centre and ran parallel to Gloucester Road... for a bit. It was as interesting as a bowl of spaghetti hoops and as dull and grey as an accountant’s socks. We lived on a junction of another road that I can’t remember the name of in a four-storey house with a blue door. In addition to this being a rather pointless observation, it is all but irrelevant to anything else. I drove past it not so long back. The door is still blue.
I had not been in Bristol a great length of time before I decided that I needed a job. I had to pay for a replacement window for my car after some revolting little oik hurled a breeze block through it in order to steal a Rachmaninov CD and a half-bag of Werther’s. It was a fairly pleasant day and I figured that I’d take a walk into the city to the job shop. I dressed myself in a suit, scraped my face and polished my teeth and set-off feeling oddly cheerful. It wouldn’t last. With a further soupçon of irrelevance, the time was about half-nine in the morning.
There’s a set of traffic lights at one particular junction near a bridge. On that day, despite it being rather early in the morning the roads and the pavements were fairly quiet. The sun shone and I imagined that birds were singing somewhere. As I neared the lights so a prison van, clearly en route to the magistrates courts in the city centre, pulled to a halt on account of the lights showing red. This was nothing particularly out of the ordinary as I’d seen such vehicles before. And lights, too, funnily enough. I therefore continued minding my own business. As I drew level with the van however, suddenly a ferocious and repetitive thudding began against one of its blackened windows. It quickly grew more ferocious and was accompanied by what sounded like a kind of scraping or clawing. As I turned my attention toward it, the van then began to rock from side to side.
The thudding and scraping (or clawing) and rocking from side to side fast intensified becoming even more aggressive and violent, and it was then that the muffled, blood-curdling screams began. Immediately my hair stood on-end while I felt the colour drain from my face, my odd cheerfulness vanishing in a split second to be replaced with absolute terror.
In hindsight it was an irrational fear, but my infrequent command of the rational had quickly fled and hidden itself behind a post. Even my cowardice had fast emptied its dignity onto the floor. I looked around. I was alone. Clearly the crazed individual within the confines of the van was directing its attention towards me. I tried to remain calm but couldn’t. My irrational fear hit me again like a shovel to the head as I suddenly believed that I was moments from being slain. Images exploded in my mind’s eye of my arterial blood spraying across a day-glow fly poster as the escaping loon chewed away at my face. My life flashed before me. Unimpressed, I tried to think of something else.
The thrashing within continued as the traffic lights descended from red to amber to green. The van continued to rock from side to side as it pulled away, while the blood-curdling screams continued too, seemingly hanging in the air like the unpleasant odour of last Friday’s socks. As the loon-mobile disappeared into the distance I leant against a wall. I remembered the day, many years before, when I was appearing in court in Frome accused of committing a minor traffic violation. On that day, before I was called to the dock an axe murderer was brought in manacled to a couple of police officers. Shrugging my shoulders and rolling my eyes to the sky I thought nervously, ‘Psychos, eh?’ And quietly awaited my coronary.
Later that day, having successfully gotten myself a job in a nightclub to begin a few days thence, I was walking home. It was a thoroughly pleasant late afternoon and I was feeling quite pleased with myself having recovered from my experience with the psychopath hours earlier. As I crossed the street that would lead me up onto North Road and to home my path was suddenly blocked by a drunken fuckwit. He first looked me up and down and then pondered a moment before slurring, ‘Shlook at yoush! (You’re) wearingsh a fuckingsh shuit!’
‘?’
Now, I hadn’t encountered such an observance of the quite-so-obvious for a while. Because my mind was occupied with thoughts of my new job however, my list of snappy comebacks and witty retorts was unfortunately not immediately accessible. ‘Yes. That is correct.’ I replied instead. To which Drunken Fuckwit quickly stood aside looking thoroughly baffled and bemused and undoubtedly in need of a nice cup of tea.
These incidents were my first introductions to life as a city-dweller in Bristol. I wasn’t overly impressed thus far, somewhat obviously, but I hoped that my new job would be fun and exciting and enable me to meet people and dismiss those incidents as if screwing up a piece of paper and hurling it over my shoulder into a bin. The job was in a nightclub in the centre of the city. It had the somewhat-odd and incorrectly-spelt name of ‘Papilon’ (meaning ‘butterfly’). I was thus rather wrong about that.
Papilon (sic) was not the most eventful of jobs that I have ever had. Being nineteen it was my first-ever bar job, yet while I can remember the incidents involving the drunken fuckwit, the psychopath and the revolting oik smashing the window of my car, because it was twenty-odd years ago I can remember very little specifically about my time at the club. I do remember that the assistant manager looked like a cross between Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen and Cher, his hair styled, I guessed, by connecting his ears to a car battery. And I recall that the manager resembled a cast member of the show ‘Cats’ who often wore leopard-print Spandex and had the personality of a Triffid. The final thing I remember about working at Papilon was being threatened with the sack on my very first night for serving a drink after the bar had closed. I’d done so because the guy I had served had been about a foot taller than I and had threatened to leap over the bar if I didn’t and thump out my teeth.
I worked at Papilon for a few months (I think), but because it was a club and the shifts were in the evenings I still needed to get myself a daytime job. I think I took a job in telesales, but I’m really not particularly sure about that.