You’ll Never Get Well No More

by

Perry Iles




“He would do better if he concentrated more on his work and less on entertaining his classmates.”
– Headmaster’s comment, Perry’s school report, 1965.

“Fuck right off.”
– Perry Iles, 2009.


The Annandale Book Month (August 2009)

I could blame God if I believed in him, or fate if I thought I was important enough to merit its notice, but as it is I’ll blame Sod’s Law and circumstance. Three days before the event, I was struck down with food poisoning and spent forty-eight hours in bed, fretting and cursing and discharging bodily fluids in random directions. The doctor gave me Immodium, which set the contents of my stomach solid and made me feel like I’d eaten a breezeblock. I was still unwell when people started arriving, so unwell that I couldn’t eat, drink or smoke, and by my standards, that’s ill, believe me.

If it hadn’t been for the efforts of my wife, the event would have been cancelled. She managed all the organisation, preparation, food, drink, room decoration, publicity, posters, invites and everything whilst simultaneously looking after the kid and the dog and playing host to various friends who filled the house to such an extent that my daughter had to sleep outside in the back of a van.

And after all this, Annandale, responded to my invitations and publicity with its usual apathy. It’s a small town, set in its ways, run by the sort of people who have committee meetings about flowerpots. It’s the sort of town that’s still having problems coming to terms with the concept of garlic bread. If you took Annandale out to dinner, it would have prawn cocktail followed by a well done steak and a nice piece of black forest gateau. And of course it was absolutely arsing down with rain, because it’s Scotland, and that’s what it always does. So I will deal with Annandale mercilessly in fiction at some later date. Of course, when the local press comes calling, I shall say that the opening party was well-attended, well-supported and that we sold loads of lovely books.

But I’m afraid the public stayed away in droves. So we still have some wine left. Having said that, we had some authors come out to play, and it was interesting to see people in the flesh and find out if their online personalities reflected reality. We had a good time, although I was still a bit woozy. My daughter kept everyone entertained with glow-in-the-dark bangles which may yet prove radioactive, and we had a meet-the-whippet hour too. The dog finished the sausage rolls when no one was looking. I was in charge of the music, supervised by my wife’s occasional demand to “take that fucking noise off.” At some point in the proceedings I realised how much I liked Mogwai, and how the fundamental flimsiness of the Cocteau Twins has dated rather badly (other than the title track of Blue Bell Knoll).

It was, all in all, a rather lovely night, full of writers and writerly stuff like alcohol and huddles of people standing on the steps outside smoking and trying to keep dry. Thanks are due to those who came. Bedtime, exhausted, 2am.




When Shall We Three Meet Again?


So there I was, trying to get cleared up, still feeling under the weather, but with a slight edge of hangover too, when into the shop came a trio of Dumfries’s finest, up for a post-menopausal bus trip while their husbands vegetated in front of whatever televised sport was on or (if they were lucky) rested in pieces beneath the back-yard patio.
‘We’re not really open,’ I said, ‘I’m just clearing up after a party.’
‘Ye’ll huv a hangower then, sonny. NNEEEEEARGHH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAAAAAARGHH’. Imagine Tom Waits speeded up to 78rpm. That’s what their laughs were like. They had faces like burst blisters and the kind of voices you could curdle milk with. I wondered if there was a cauldron that needed stirring out on some blasted heath somewhere. They wandered in with that particular Scottish aroma that’s half cheap perfume and half Embassy Regal.
‘Ye’re sellin books, then. I like a drama, so I do.’
‘Aye, Hettie, ye dae,’
‘Would that be the Prince of Denmark or Albert Square?’ I asked, suddenly feeling like that Irish guy out of Black Books.
‘Whit’s he oan aboot?’
‘Dinnae ken, Hettie, it’s the Queen Vic in Albert Square, no the Prince ay Denmark.’
‘Ah’ve got a vulture,’ the oldest one said. I wasn’t surprised, but thought it irrelevant.
‘Aye, she hus. She’s got a thingaby, ken? A gift vulture, like.’
‘Fae the shoap, see?’
I scratched my head for a little while. ‘Oh, a voucher,’ I finally managed, when the woman put a crumpled book token down on the counter.
A pissing book token.
What the fucking fuck? I mean, what the fuck am I supposed to do with a fucking book token? What does she fucking think this is, a fucking bookshop or something?

Oh.

Anyway, I told her that the Author’s Book Council Guild had refused to grant us Book Token Availability Insurance due to our independent status following the personal intervention of JK Rowling who was worried about how badly we’d influence her sales figures. I advised her to contact her local branch of Waterstones, who would no doubt find her something with a bit of romance in it by a woman with three names. Then I locked the door and hid for half an hour until I was sure they’d left town.

Recently, on the peer-review website YouWriteOn, I took some flak for suggesting that 98% of the book-reading public were morons. I don’t know what the fuck I was on about. I should have said 99.5%. The other 0.5% are writers.

God help me, I’m not cut out for this.



Is it Safe?


Toothache is a bastard. I figured my immune system had been laid low by the effects of food poisoning, and I’d acquired an abscess. So, weeping a little, I went to the local dentist this morning, who told me to come back at four for a checkup. At the appointed time, I put the Back in Ten Minutes sign on the shop and wandered off. My normal dentist was on holiday, and I was ushered into the treatment room by a Polish man with tattoos who looked like he’d be at home on a road crew.
Yep, he was the dentist. Klinik Dentikal Warszawa, his card said. I thought that was track three off David Bowie’s Low. He sat me down and had a look. He rapped the end of his dentist’s prong thing against the tooth.
‘Pain?’
‘Ummmmmmfffffff!’ I wept some more.
‘I take out,’ he said.
Ok, I thought, I’ll make an appointment and try and scrounge a scrip for some more of those industrial-strength painkillers I like so much.
‘I take out now,’ he said.
Oh fuck.
It took him two hours. He shattered the tooth, drilled it out in pieces, tugging broken bits out, grunting with effort and swearing in Polish, and told me that I would feel my jawbone in the base of the socket for a few days.
Lovely.
Anyway, books. None sold today. Sorry. Far too self-absorbed.



Chucking the Yogurt.


It wasn’t God, fate, Sod’s Law or chance. It was yogurt. Three weeks ago I went shopping and got a cheap four-pack of Danone Activia from the Co-op. It was cheap because it was at its sell-by date. I put them with the other yogurts in the fridge, forgot they were there and ate one last Tuesday when it was ten days too old.
Bad move.
So, last night when the anaesthetic from the dentist wore off and I felt like I’d lost a fight with a group of fifteen-year-olds in baseball caps (you know, the sort who look like they’ve been raised by rats), I couldn’t eat much. I know what I’ll do, I thought, I’ll have a couple of those nice yogurts.
Even worse move.
Two hours later, I was back in the state I’d been in last week. The yogurts were now three weeks too old. Their adverts say the live pro-biotic bacteria improve digestive transit, which as far as these particular yogurts goes is a bit like saying Josef Fritzl grounded his daughter for a little while.
They went through me like castor oil through a short grandmother.
At some point I was awakened by my wife, brandishing the last yogurt under my nose.
‘Have you been eating these?’ she said.
I nodded.
‘You fucking idiot.’
So the shop stayed shut today, unlike my fucking sphincter.
I promise I’ll talk more about the books and less about my own self-pity soon. On the plus side, I’ve lost eight pounds in six days and my wife is pleased that I haven’t dared to fart in a week, so hey, every cloud…

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Feeble Excuses, Procrastination and Displacement Activities

(Things I do when I should be writing)

From the first issue of Words with JAM

This autumn I will be mostly thinking about Cheryl Cole. Not with any sense of prurience – a man has to know his limitations, as Clint Eastwood once said, and I’m reliably informed that I’m hung like a hummingbird and have the sexual imagination of a fencepost, without any trace of its attendant rigidity. But dear little Cheryl has achieved a kind of asexual, robotic perfection, which was aptly, if unconsciously, parodied on last week’s X-Factor when she did that military dance routine as she mimed to her appalling new song. What I mean is, is she actually human any more? Time was, long ago, when the combination of attractive womanhood and a Geordie accent used to flick my lust-nipple for some totally inexplicable reason, but it now no longer does, and it’s all her fault. Soon you’ll be able to buy your own Cheryl Cole on the internet, and she’ll be everywhere, and familiarity will breed contempt so you’ll need a puncture repair kit so you can make her better every time you batter her senseless for not getting your dinner on the table by five o’clock.

The X-Factor, which I’m watching every week instead of writing, seems to be about turning people into clones of themselves, a kind of Tussaud-ising process in which anything fallible – a hint of wanton sag here, a hair out of place there – is removed, and that’s a pity. Look at the ghastly twins, John and Edward. What immortal hand or eye could frame their fearful symmetry? Step forward, Simon Cowell, grinning like a wanking Jap, predatory to the end, envisioning no doubt a Christmas single, another new Rolls Royce and a go on Whitney Houston early in the New Year when they’ve finished drying her out.

But as far as this year’s X-Factor is concerned, I want Olly Murs to win. Not because he’s any good, or because my wife fancies him or anything, but simply because of his name. Me and Olly Murs have names that are exactly the same. I mean, obviously they’re not, but let the picture go all wobbly and turn black and white as we flash back to a classroom in 1959, where the teacher is taking down names. Fine if you’re Dave Smith, or Andy Johnson, or Sue Green, but when you get to Perry Iles, there’s a pause…
‘What?’
‘Perry Iles, Miss.’
‘Terry Ives? Barry Irons?’
‘No, Miss: Perry Iles.’
‘Is that Perry as in Perry Como?’ [Titter goes round the room]
‘Yes, Miss.’
‘Speak up, boy.’
‘Yes Miss.’
‘And Iles is I-S-L-E-S, is it?’
‘No, Miss, it’s I-L-E-S.’
‘I-S-L-E?’
…anyway, you can see where I’m going. It’s a useless name, the sort of name that gives you an inferiority complex from the age at which you first learn to talk. But its redeeming feature is that once it’s in your head you don’t forget it, because I’ll make sure you fucking well don’t (for god’s sake stop me before I kill more…). I refuse to use a pseudonym, because when I’m rich and famous and living with a surgically-enhanced Swedish contortionist and her twin sister in a hand-crafted Andalusian mansion, I want weeping ex-girlfriends to sigh with wistful remorse whenever they google my name, and wish they’d treated me better when they had the opportunity. It’s probably not as bad as some names, though. I imagine Fifi Trixibelle Geldof, Heavenly Hiraani Tigerlily Hutchence, Moon Unit Zappa and Zowie Bowie, or any child who was born in a muddy field in Glastonbury in 1970 and christened Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, will wonder what the fuck I’m making such a fuss about, but they’ll know themselves how it feels to be marked down as being different just because of your name.

And I bet Olly Murs does, too. Ally Muir? Olé Mars? And even when people get it right phonetically, they’ll still spell it wrong: Olli Murrs, Ollie Murze. Even those rich fuckers at Microsoft laugh at us – their spellchecker redefines me as Perky Lies, and my friend Olly as Oily Moors. I feel such kinship for the poor boy, I really do, which is why I’ve spent the last couple of weeks repeating his name as I go about my daily tasks, mimicking the sepulchral tones of the X-Factor’s voice-over man. ‘Olly Murrrrrrrrs’, I growl as I wash the saucepans, and my wife points out that the kitchen window is open and the gossipy woman from Number 28 has just walked by. “Me and Olly Murs”, I sing to the tune of Me and Mrs Jones, until my wife tells me I’d make a good living hanging around the cottages on Hampstead Heath looking out for the George twins, Boy and Michael. I tourette his name with loud abandon as I joyfully skip down the aisles of my local Tesco (AISLES, there’s another one. And EYELES. Bastards.) My neighbours have started talking about me, calling their children indoors and their pets to heel when I pass, and giving my wife those sidelong looks that embody sympathy and a degree or two of concern.

But there he is: Olly Murs, on the X-Factor, with his name in black and white, spelt correctly, projected onto the screen behind him during his performance for ten million people to see. OLLY fucking MURS. Go on, my son, do the business, get out there and win the bastard. Do it for people like me.

Disclaimer: By the time this is published Olly Murs will have probably been voted out and everyone will have forgotten he ever existed and started to spell his name wrong again. Which just goes to show something or other, but I’m not sure what.
- Perky Lies, October 2009.

“Bleach it while you’re down there, doc.” Next edition, instead of writing, Perry Iles will be contemplating the pros and cons of rectal surgery.

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