In response to my failing marriage, our mutual intellectual deconstruction of my personal – which is to say romantic – life which so inevitably followed the shared infidelities of two so neurotic souls, I befriended a bizarre troupe of sixteen year olds, ten strong (who I would only later learn to be the VHS Crew) a symbolic grasp for freedom, for the liberation that oozed through their constant swearing and that their poverty and joblessness afforded. Our meeting had been unplanned but was life-changing within moments. In the light of sadness I tended to walk quickly between streets, hurrying to places I had no interest in being, and none more urgent than the underpass that crossed four lanes of medium flow traffic a few minutes walk from my house. Landscaped trees dotted the concrete at the two entranceways but it was still a place resolutely uncluttered by the niceties of urban redevelopment, the trees themselves half-stunted, dwarfed by the enormity of a derelict and grey former office complex sprawled stark over a vast floor plan, its angles like the ancient architecture of a distant past, as inconceivable as history itself, its windows bent and boarded, the whole place reeking with the incompleteness of unfinished plans, of stalled momentum and brutalist assertions. Rusted long-defunct aerials still pointed skyward, transmitting pleas for deliverance and redemption, their signals unidentifiable through the murk of occurrence, unheard and futile, residents left voiceless by change. The road tore through memory like the underpass tore through the earth, and the youths approached me in the dim ceiling lights that flickered with every vehicular passing, only five of their number, each clad tightly in heavily stonewashed bright blue denim, fashion relics, monuments to the decades that preceded their birth, an historical re-enactment that – instead of the slayings and bloodsheds of which any Briton can be proud – created a palpable sense of the youthful ennui and disenfranchisement of the 1980s, their white socks glistening at the gap between trainer and jean cuff, their inaction somehow more authentic than any documented source. Their faces betrayed no such awareness. Guttural groans echoed from their parted lips and around the tiled walls of the underpass, graffiti dowsed, streaks of spilt ketchup like theatrical blood in violent knife-spatters right up to the ceiling and which left the place with the slight tang of vinegar among the embedded piss. Declarations of illicit desire were transcribed with a thick tipped marker pen. “For my urgent relief please call”. They all forget to write the number, countless handjobs left hanging in the ether of possibility, of drunken consideration, experimental abandon, never performed. Or “Human landscaping: I WILL DEFLOWER BY APPOINTMENT”, humorous sloganeering of unusual intellect, betraying no doubt a dangerous psychopathy. The rest of it just tags sprayed carelessly – the paint dripped dry beneath the body of the text in thin lines, marking territory like giant bald cats, paint cans and illiteracy the new scent glands. Any artistry in the underpass was borne of life not of spray paint; tags became photographs, family portraits, old super 8 films unearthed in the dust of locked attic rooms, lives observable through their poorly executed lines and patchy colours. It was their only shot at permanence, made all the more futile by the high pressure water jets that would monthly return the walls to cheap virgin white, a museum robbed of exhibits or burnt to the ground. A Sisyphean attempt to come to terms with mortality, it could at least keep them busy until the inevitable, this endless spraying, their pigmented particulates carried off by the terrible wind in faint coloured gusts before a mark is even made. The eyes in this circle of youths around me spoke of windows dripping with condensation and yellowed net curtains stuck to the damp, the limp colour of pain in the faded brickwork of factory exteriors. They peered at me hesitantly, one of the males half-gesturing towards my trouser pocket with a loosely clenched fist. I impulsively drew a handful of change, held it extended in the flat of my palm like a holy truth, the five moving in shuffles around me, as if they were nervous of the money or in reverence of it like a strange sovereign idol, the coins themselves of soul, spirit, life, shackled to banks and treasuries and forever desecrated and blasphemed in pockets and purses and desired and manipulated across generations by all who learn of their weird power.
Another of the males looked closely into my hand, his head cocked on its thick meaty neck like straining gammon. “We don’t want none two pence,” his accent a strange bastard of Norfolk vowels and inflections and urbanised street impropriety. “We ain’t want none two pennies from yo child hands.” I was surprised to be called child as I was at least ten years older than he was, but it somehow felt correct.
“Not gold for our wants mister,” another male said. He wore a sweatshirt in oblongs of primary colours, with three press-stud buttons running from the neck to the shoulder; they hung open over a black t-shirt, the peripheries of its design edging past the deep yellow fabric. Fragments of wispy moustache peppered his lip like the remnants of an earlier meal. They had circled around me, told me later it had been unconscious movement. He tore a scrap of paper from an A4 sheet he had unfolded from the back pocket of his stonewash jeans and put it into his mouth, chewed it like decent gum. “We not none too interested in you fakkin pences, pounds or otherwise leggy tappy tappying, y’got me,” he said, past the sodden paper.
“I don’t think I know what you want,” I said. My voice sounded a long way off, as though it had come from somewhere else. In a strange way it felt good to have somebody to talk to.
The first leaned into me, the paperboard bill of his baseball cap jabbing into the side of my head. Embroidered on its front there was a truck and the words Necton Diner, a long derelict building rotting along the exponentially bleak fenlands of the A47 towards Kings Lynn. It had to be an old cap, its white crest blotted yellow with the sweating scalps of years if not decades. “We be wanting the whiteness,” he whispered.
“The white juice,” said the second youth, lisping slightly because of the claggy paper in his mouth. He licked his lips while he said the words. They were all licking their lips. The only girl among them was oddly attractive in her scraped-back hair. She was silent and pale and I guessed sixteen. Her jeans were so tight I could see the declivity where denim and genitalia eventually connected. I felt morose in light of it and wondered who at that moment my wife was with.
“Mister got the white fluids? Gottem for us eh mister?”
“Do you mean?” I said pointlessly. The girl looked at me then half turned away. The loose change in my pocket suddenly felt heavy and superfluous. The other four were all nodding, nodding and licking their lips.
“White mate,” they said, as though unanimously stricken with a debilitating speech impediment.
“It ain’t goin hurt you like child,” garbled a voice from behind me. I knew there was hopelessness in my eyes, could feel it in their dead weight. I couldn’t see the mouth the words had come from. The reluctant hum of moderate weekday traffic sank through the concrete above our heads and was dull like the underpass itself, wheels purring in echoes that bounced from the tiling and the posters for unheard reggae acts hung with duct tape.
“Nah mistah an we is in appreciate.”
“Yeah mistah.”
“Yeah.”
“You is a urban hero of them east anglan skies my mate.”
“Bona fide!”
“Pistachio!” they chimed harmoniously, like some two-bit MC outfit who prowled Norfolk communities in search of social commentary, deconstructing definitions for their own skewed and private communications, where edible nuts formed salted green-tinged declarations of celebration. They spoke a language not of the streets but of the wastelands; their libraries were burnt out cars, their churches empty industrial buildings. They made love on lush green beds of broken beer bottles, felt the romance of dog shit left amongst knee high scrubs whose small white flowers were the architecture of these kids’ own metropolis.
“Okay,” I said. I felt my phone vibrating in my coat pocket and squeezed the screen between my thumb and forefinger until I felt the plastic crack. It was probably my wife, still out of breath and of musky genital and locked in someone’s bathroom where she would piss after coming, urgently reporting a digested account of her encounter to be elaborated upon later. She found this kind of hurried impulsive honesty important. I was always the first to know when they had finished. I think this was supposed to make me feel significant and like I shared in the excitement of her perverse therapy. The silent partner. She was right in some ways; I got fucked too. There were often footsteps in the background when we spoke like this, or running showers, or TV sports turned low, details that built an awful and vivid picture of the encounters she described. I was sure she would leave a voicemail. “It’s white fluid you want?” Half delirious and out of my depth in even basic conversations, I had been long silenced by my wife’s absent sexuality, slave to the crumbling futility of our marriage. Words felt wrong together, and even grammatically incorrect sentences were deafening expressions of heartbreak in all of its legitimized finality, vessels of the revelations of adultery that conspired against me in purposelessness, rendered true by narrative.
They started clapping, not as applause but as unpredictable, arrhythmic, spontaneous, piercing slaps that cracked through the tunnel like gunfire, a further extension of their building frenzy. The girl’s eyes narrowed and she looked half away from me. It was sultry in low wattage.
“You gettin the gazebo!” whooped the kid with the taut porcine neck, more boy than man with his eyes electric.
I unbuttoned my fly. It was a difficult time. They talked about white fluid with the fervour of the idolatrous, desperate for life. I thought their ambiguous anti-literate allusions and their gang intimidations referred to the forcible public release of my semen; that they were street-queers out for nameless intercourse kept clean through anonymity, or that in their self-made new Norfolk neo-Borboritic religious sacraments – scratched on brick walls and discarded cardboard sandwich cartons – they had canonized a new Eucharist for the porn-addled young, where seminal emissions formed the figurative consumable blood of a contemporary electronic messiah with real life oozing through its enzymes, to be collected and worshipped with all the underhanded devotion of any Christian artefact, to get one step closer to the salvation and eternity promised in its coagulated globules, tenderly wobbling spilt on the skin of the holy, in the beginning was the seed. So ravaged with the vulnerability of my phone’s vibrating message alert – the cold mechanistic articulation of her voicemails left me mundane with remarkable efficiency – I relinquished all sense and propriety and social acceptability and I screwed taboos and social mores, desperate to feel myself and my organs connected once more to a world that needed and even wanted them, slightly less alone for as long as it would take to come. The recoiling youths hit me in the face at once and my hands instinctively moved to the sting, my fly open and shamed with the wind running through the fabric jamb.
“You terribly fucken faggot queer bastard!” said one.
“Of all me fucked plops!” said another.
“Fuck I puked inside of my head!” said a third, large faced youth.
The folded arms of their female associate spoke pages of perfectly-crafted, targeted criticisms, entirely devastating in their simple honesty. “Brothers a apricot,” she said, her voice a higher pitch than I imagined it would be, like a sound escaped from complex machinery. Her inconsistent syntax sat uncomfortably with her pencilled features, her city sneer, her eyes that swam in memories of domestic abuse; beneath her unbranded sweatshirt would be bruises and scars, brush stroke markers laid down in vivid colours against the white of her skin in awful rituals in the darkness of home; the smell of other people’s beer would always make her sick although she would like to drink beer herself; her ribs would be promontories between which my fingers would rest; I would mean everything I did. She looked at me properly for the first time. My dropped fly had been my fall from acceptability; from the cracked tiles of the underpass the world had risen above me. I glimpsed recognition on her face and her thick lip gloss caught the light and glistened wet, half-angled in a smirk, huge gold hoops in her ears like archaic scientific instruments that quivered with urgency at the pitiful, accidental indecency of my incomprehension. I saw a barely perceptible tic of her trapezius, flickering like a computer monitor, and in that reflex felt a bond with these weird youths, whose anachronous clothing and Norvic patois and fundamental communality was somehow as ancient as the crumbling city walls, flecks of time unfettered by progress. I gasped an apology and zipped up and heard the click of crisp leather business shoes striding down the stairs to the underpass in the determined 4/4 rhythm of executive dreariness, the artillery precision of a life spent moving between office complexes, conference calls and regurgitated data, packaged in plasticized document wallets and expressive graphical representations, hyper-cleaned carpets and stainless underpants each less than six months old, unused kitchen surfaces moist with Dettol and unused wives drenched in the boozy tears of coffee mornings and shitty paperbacks. We all turned to look at him as he strode into the light, sliding thick fingers across the screen of a device clasped with the affection formerly reserved for infants or mammals in the crook of his left palm, fingering it with such considered strokes it almost felt obscene to watch. We caught his eye a few steps before he was on top of us and his stroking hand fell limp, his mouth dropped open, his greying hair and perfectly shaved face concealing unmentionable suburban horrors beneath the cold rubbery skin of commercial relations. He spoke not a word but yanked the leather shoulder bag from his – shoulder – and threw it towards us, and in tears ran in fits and awkward sprint-steps in the direction he had come from, his sobs just audible above the scuffing of soles upon concrete. The bag slumped untouched between us all like a monolithic idol.
“You fucken people is all the same,” said one of them, a terrible honesty to his voice that made life feel grave and pointless. “Perverts and animals.”
“Don’t yo see kid that white juice a life we want to feel drunk up right in the side of us?”
“Please,” I said. “Please do tell me what you want.” I had an ugly tendency towards pleading; my wife had asked me to try to control it when we first got together and I pretended I had, but it kept on happening. I revoked agency.
“Shat your snakes cunt you don’t listenin! We ain’t about for your cock or your bollick or even your wordsearches!”
“Contrarywise and sunder, we come here for milk, sir, of bovine udder, and you goin get us some.”
Milk. Just milk. There was something improbably sensible about this group of calcium crazed hoodlums running gently, thirstily amok through the city centre, congregating outside grocery shops and express sized supermarkets for the civilized consumption of pint-sized increments of lactate. Hardly the antisocial regimes constructed by the alienation of the twenty-first century’s faceless and unchecked capitalist infrastructure. They existed outside of life.
“Milk,” I said in disbelief. Like Catholics they each crossed themselves as I uttered the word, the crosses encompassing the mammary with the reverence of touch and the eternal significance of monotheistic religious symbolism.
“Fuck mistah shhhh your flaps up!”
I didn’t want to question the ritual and I imagined milk drenched sexual rites, milk intersecting through vaginas and anuses and lubricating the same in warm abundant showers of erotic lactation. I imagined the girl’s two breasts in my hands and felt immediately sorry.
“Okay,” I said. They had a look of milk in their eyes. “Follow me. We’ll go the red brick shop down the way.”
We left the underpass together and towards the shop, a hopeless Norfolk department store of 1950s gents polo shirts and giant cotton trousers that pleated around the waistband, empty metal shelves left rippled at the back with rust specks and hung at all the wrong heights, linoleum tiling that failed to reach the peripheries of the floor that was grey and damp-looking at the edges, waiting for the inevitable. They youths kept a distance of a few feet behind me which made me feel like a perverse authority, and they made heavy disorientating tribal beats with an interplay of their mouths and tongues, screeching unintelligible mantra over the top at an almost destructive pitch. They sounded like pack animals speaking the language of the early days.
In the shop they pushed past me and through the entrance barriers – a pointless emblematic signage envisaging an abundance of customers where in truth there were handfuls – and knew exactly where to go, drawn like insects in some transverse orientation to the dairy fridges that hummed in flickering light bulbs, a mating call to the yearning and the lactose idolatrous. They paused for a moment before the fridge and gazed through its glass, the cartons lined symmetrically across the shelves, perfect white and near-pornographic in ascending size order. The whiteness of the milk. With an unspoken declaration of movement they pulled the door open and each grabbed a four pint full-fat jug and unscrewed the blue plastic caps – the five of which dropped rattling to the floor, light discarded obstacles that seemed to speak volumes about our youth and our cities – and carefully peeled off the thin plastic stopper that popped from the rim with a fine splash of milk droplets and they drank heavily and determined into the blissful electric silence, their pleasured gulps masked by the drone of the open refrigerator. A shop worker’s crooked face looked on disgusted, eyes sodden and narrowed and his thick red cheeks fluttering with breaths of disapproval, cold and gruesome and hard under strip lights, a frozen turkey that would never thaw; he was gesturing with tics to some colleagues a few aisles away, and I could almost see the anger entering the body of a middle-aged woman dressed head to toe in standardised uniform-issue red synthetic fibres with a face like a battered puppy long-past affection, her sculpted hair quivering about her like a picture frame in an earthquake.
“Hey shoppy” I said, and threw my wallet at his feet. “They’re with me.”
He counted the five milk jugs twice, I saw his lips moving, and crouched down and picked up my wallet and pulled out a ten-pound note. He threw the wallet back onto the floor and shook his head as though we had made him a desperate witness to the most indecent thing imaginable. The woman walked with him to the checkout, both vibrating with a world of injustices, caught in the field of each other’s hatred like magnets, pointing and throwing hands and scorn back through the aisles to where we stood. And the youths they drank and drank, pint after pint, neatly piling the empty plastic jugs at their feet, thick white moustaches left decorating all of their lips like crude disguises. A wholesome drink for strong bones and teeth. They sure loved milk.
They weren’t mugging old ladies or taking drugs or doing unprotected sex with each other. They were drinking milk.
Struck like a car accident with a sudden feeling of clarity I cracked open a four pint jug of my own, so cold and creamy.
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