Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Rees was a bit of a retard, it has to be said. He was 6 foot 3 inches tall, powerfully built and not bad looking in his blonde Incredible Hulk way. He took prescription drugs daily to alleviate some manically hyperactive condition, as well as anything illegal that was going. I don’t know what his prescribed tablets were, but I took one of them once and it knocked me out for several hours. Rees needed four of them a day, official, to pass for normal. He worshipped Phil, his oldest friend, with whom he had been at school in Rhymney and had followed to Cardiff when Phil moved there. Phil was a rodent-like guy with dark hair and beard, about 5 foot 5 inches tall, shifty, and not to be trusted in any dealings, though I didn’t know this at the time.
 
I thought Phil was all right, cool and very ethnically Welsh in the way his chin jutted when he cackled with laughter. Phil and I were both deeply into playing a code-breaking game called Mastermind, smoking dope, and listening to Frank Zappa albums, activities that formed the basis of the fair amount of time we spent together. He lived with Tanya upstairs from the bed-sit in which I lived with Sophie, £10 a week places in 1974. Sophie never trusted Phil in the first place.
 
Both Phil and I lost our jobs early in 1975. He had been a site engineer with a concreting company, I a credit controller with a finance house. We both knew a guy who lived across the road who was making decent money and having fun as the owner of a bus that took passengers from Amsterdam to India and back. Phil had an uncle in the bus business. We ended up pooling our resources to buy an ageing Leyland Tiger single-decker coach from the uncle. Phil drove it back from the depot outside Bridgend to the street where we lived a mile or so from the centre of Cardiff. We parked up immediately outside our front door and did no more than look at it occasionally for about a month. The bus sat beside the pavement accusing us of neglecting the overhaul on the motor we had to carry out. We didn’t get accused as often as we might have been because we didn’t go out much. Our irregular hours during unemployment were chiefly taken up with enjoying the excellent Afghani hash and occasional tablets of Palfium that became available at this time.
 
In early April we got on with it. The internal components of the 7-litre engine took up temporary residence spread out across the floors of our bed-sits. We fitted new bearings and stuff and paid a mechanic friend of Phil’s to do the tricky bits like piston rings and timing adjustment. When the job was finished, we went back into the house to play Mastermind, listen to Zappa, get stoned, and occasionally discuss the project over the next couple of weeks.
 
Rees had been round repeatedly at this time to escape his difficulties in being a father and husband on a council estate on the fringes of the city. One night I went up to Phil’s room to find Rees with a noose formed from the bus’s tow-rope around his neck. I made my way past him where he stood at the top of the precipitous stairwell up to Phil’s attic bed-sit. The rope was slung with sufficient slack to hang Rees over a beam out above the stairwell, around which it was wound then tied-off on an exposed rafter.  Rees stood right on the edge of the top step for several minutes, saying things like “Oh Phil, mun, this is terrible . . . I definitely wouldn’t kill anyone if they could ‘ang me”. It never occurred to me that Rees might kill anyone, as he was fundamentally good-natured in his inept and comically stupid way. Maybe that’s what the tablets did for him. He never gave any inkling of a violent disposition. Quite what the point was I never found out. Rees just seemed to want to know what being about to be hanged was like. Phil was behind him and asking if he wanted to be pushed, which would make Rees shudder out a deep, emphatic “No”.
 
When the noose was removed, a curiously neutral atmosphere ensued in which we all sat down to smoke a joint. Talk turned to giving the bus a test run. I was game. We’d been no further in it than around the block a couple of times since completing the overhaul. I began to sense that Phil and Rees were holding out on me about something as our conversation proceeded by intermittent and inconclusive stages. The longer I stuck around the more awkward the subject seemed to become until Phil told me that he and Rees were planning a run to Merthyr Tydfil. Testing the bus was to be combined with a break-in by Rees to a chemist’s shop he knew of. The place stood in a comparatively deserted location at the tail end of some back streets on the fringes of the town. Rees believed it would be a soft touch for breaking into and obtaining quantities of drugs. He lacked only the means of getting there late at night and disappearing quickly after doing the business.
 
My failure to excuse myself on being apprised of this was largely down to my joint-owner’s interest in how the bus would run. I was not a sufficiently law-abiding person to be put off by the criminality of the proposal, which seemed, on balance, to offer an interesting night out. Sophie was away visiting her father and I was at a loose end. By 11 p.m. we were off, heading north out of Cardiff into the South Walian fastnesses of the Valleys. The road rose steadily through the 20 miles to Merthyr, the frontier capital of the Valleys and last and biggest stop before mountain wilderness takes over where the Brecon Beacons begin. Throughout the trip, I had only a vague idea where we were. Like most Cardiffians, I knew nothing much about the Valleys. I could remember once going as far north as Pontypridd as a toddler with my Mum to the town’s open-air market. We drove along roads that followed low lines through the increasingly large hills that shadowed either side. It was mostly very dark with occasional outcrops of lights in the distance from small former mining towns.
 
Phil announced that we needed fuel. After half an hour the bus had already used most of the couple of gallons of diesel that had been in the tank. A few minutes later, we pulled in alongside a locked diesel pump on the forecourt of a closed filling station. It was set back on a minor road just off a roundabout on the A470. He and Rees must have known the place and it probably featured in any plan they’d formed. Traffic would have come this way from the main road frequently while the filling station was open. At around midnight, not a single vehicle passed while we were there. Rees, who had been keeping up a high-energy line in more-or-less ignorable babble all the way from Cardiff, jumped out of the bus with Phil behind him. Phil opened the cover at the side of the bus and removed the cap from the fuel tank’s filler vent. Rees produced a Bowie knife and proceeded to apply it to the thick black rubber pipe up near the filler nozzle padlocked to the body of the pump. No sooner had he done so than a spout of diesel gushed out all over his upper body. He had been holding the pipe firmly in position with one hand while he cut with the other. The pressure he’d been exerting caused it to flip up to discharge directly onto his chest, head and shoulders as soon as the blade cut through. At the same moment an alarm went off high on the wall of the building behind us. The diesel spewing from the pipe was hurriedly directed into the bus’s fuel tank. Rapid exchanges took place between Phil and Rees. Before I had worked out what was going on, Phil got into the bus and drove off. Rees and I ran across the road, negotiated a barbed-wire fence, and headed off into the darkness of one of the big hills looming above us.
 
Rees set a pace that left me breathless, following a line across rising ground for a couple of miles before dropping around the hill’s broad shoulder into the adjacent valley. After about 10 minutes we stopped to look down several hundred feet from the impenetrable security of the wild darkness as the police turned up with their blue lights flashing. "I did it for Phil, mun, I had to do it for Phil,” Rees said as we moved on, stumbling on clumps of grass in the darkness. He was still dripping with diesel and stank of it in the damp April night. I was by then feeling thoroughly disoriented, having no idea where we were or where we were going and amazed at the improbability of what was happening. More than once Rees affirmed that “We can’t let Phil down,” the Igor / Master terms of their relationship becoming clearer to me. We were doing all this for Phil, mun. We could not let Phil down.
 
After some forty minutes in the wilds, we began descending towards a main road. Rees had been hyped-up beyond responding coherently to any of my questions concerning what we were supposed to be doing during our strenuous walk. He now explained that we were going to wait out of sight for Phil to come by in the bus and pick us up. We would be 10 miles by road from where we’d filled up, having crossed into another valley. The dead giveaway of Rees’s diesel-soaked person would not be as extreme a liability as it had been when the alarm went off back down on the filling station’s forecourt. 

 It was not long before Phil pulled up. Rees and I dashed out of the darkness into the bus. I was surprised that they’d worked out this rendezvous in the time between Rees cutting the pipe and Phil getting the hell out of there. They must have drawn instinctually on their intimate knowledge of the road systems and local geography of their home ground.
 
We drove away. In due course, we pulled up in a strangely deserted and totally run-down part of Merthyr Tydfil. We parked where two long straight streets met at an angle of about 45 degrees, with the chemist’s in question about 50 feet across the road in front of us. Nothing whatsoever moved around us and there wasn’t a single light to be seen. The whole place seemed in some other dimension, all cast in a sort of ice-grey neutrality and poised sharply on the existential moment of what Rees was about to do. This was to produce a brick, which he had evidently stowed along with the Bowie knife in the capacious inner recesses of his burly overcoat. He walked from the bus looking around him as he crossed the street then threw the brick through the shop window and pulled out glass enough to get in.
 
About 5 minutes later he emerged by the same route and ran to the bus with a plastic grocery bag full of bottles, tubes and packets of this and that. While Phil and I conducted a preliminary root through the goods, Rees went back for the rest. Another few minutes and we were on our way, cruising back to Cardiff, having already established that we had about a litre of opium tincture, a handful of decent speed and a vast quantity of Nembutal, Tuinol, and other varieties of barbiturate. If there was any smack, Palfium, or other concentrated opiate, I never saw it, which is probably just as well.
 
We got back to the house about 2.30 a.m. The lights were still on in Chris Harris’s room on the upper floor. I think Phil may have told Chris about the business. Chris was a serious junkie and well-placed for distributing any saleable drugs. He was a steel worker at Cardiff’s East Moors plant and looked a bit like Jim Morrison with a beard, which seemed to keep him supplied with women. He was also a sick bastard who took any opportunity to use a needle on anyone he could. He liked virgin veins, his own having long deteriorated.
 
The opium tincture was the main attraction out of our unspectacular haul. While Phil went about injecting Rees and himself, Chris offered to give me a shot. First, he got a spoon and filled it from the big brown bottle. Next he set fire to the liquid to burn off most of the alcohol, drew it into a hypo, and injected it into my arm. It hit like 300 volts and more-or-less instant oblivion followed. A couple of hours later I woke up in a chair and took a spoonful orally. I ended up lying on the floor of Phil’s flat drifting in and out of consciousness for hours. My head was propped up on a paint can that tipped over at one point, spilling paint on the linoleum. Phil got me out of there as soon as I came round properly. He mentioned the paint spill, but didn’t make an issue of it. 
 
After a messy couple of weeks on barbiturates, we eventually got the bus ready to go. We set off for India in high spirits with paid-up passengers and forged insurance documents. But that’s another story and one that finally taught that me Phil could not be trusted.