What If...

I'm haunted. I'm ghost-ridden. An ectoplasmic nimbus envelopes me at all times. I'm wrapped in clammy arms, heavy as damp lagging. Ghosts of the dead, and ghosts of the living. It's a product of my advancing age, and my declining years: I'm wraith-struck at all times, trapped in a hall of associative mirrors, memory bouncing off memory, until the whole becomes a brilliant low northern sun, illuminating even as it blinds. 

I'm old. My mother has just died. I've been back at the family house, a family house without family in it. It is hollowed out, rubble, a reliquary. As my mum got smaller and sicker, the house shrank round her: three storeys became two, then one, then three rooms, two, and finally a single room could meet all her needs. The rest of the house didn't go away, but it wears signs of neglect the way people do: bowed, sagging, creased. The walls are sallow and cracked, everything moth's back-brown or fag-ash grey. Dust smothers everything: the feathery ash of some home counties Vesuvius settling on forgotten towels, carved up school desks, static bikes, abandoned canvases, cracked bottles of two-in-one shampoo and conditioner, biscuity toothpaste dried onto the brush, crumbling like aspirin. The whole slope shouldered enterprise scattered with pumice. 

Hidden away in these rooms are forgotten lives. My forgotten lives. There were some strange, touching surprises: my dad, whom I assumed had no interest in anything I ever did, kept, in his brief case, a pencil sketch of The Smiths I had drawn when I was 15. I never knew. 

The other three look alright but Morrissey looks like Justin Timberlake dressed as Rick Astley for a Saturday Night Live skit. Still, it was an odd and sweet thing to find. Maybe he liked me. 

There were love letters. Not from my dad. Some fraught and odd love letters casting a new light on relationships I had fixed ideas about. I find myself unreachable in this correspondence: I don't know the boy this girl is writing to. He too is ghostly. 

There are letters from the school friends I left in Brighton when we moved to Basingstoke. The letters are delightful: earnest and pretentious, and full of teenage concerns. There's a lot about music, whole lists of bands you had to be into ("Diesel Park West"!), lots of back-biting about mutual friends, and so much stuff about girls.  Everything was about girls. They were talking to girls, they were being rebuffed by girls, they were rebuffing girls, they were going to parties...with girls. I think I can see why I stopped writing back. I was in Basingstoke. I was short and greasy and I hadn't talked to a girl since I left Brighton. My friends were a gang. They were cool. They did stuff. I went down to visit my friend, Gerard, and he had a sexy sister, the Rocky Horror Soundtrack on his turntable, and his bedroom was flammable with Falcon hairspray fumes. It was all intoxicatingly mature, and I was at least a year behind them. We pomped our hair into quiffs, I borrowed a suit jacket, we hit the town, and I got served a pint of cider in a pub! It was such a galvanizing moment that I still dress this way. Basingstoke had nothing to offer compared to this: the stench of chlorine, some fly-blown shoe-shops, low-to-mid level bullying and failing my exams. 

Why did I stop writing back? I think I was ashamed. I had nothing to show them. They were so much more advanced than I was in all ways. It was embarrassing having to report back that I'd still not made eye-contact with a woman, never mind any other kind of contact. I wonder what my life would have been like if I had never left. If I'd had that gang, and that city as the back-drop to my young manhood, the resources of my old school, and if I continued to get the exams results I was getting then (top of everything, mate). Best case scenario though, is that I would have ended up the singer for Plastic Fantastic, so its possible I dodged a bullet there. 

The other surprise was my comic strips. 

I drew a lot of comic strips when I was younger. The stuff I've got back from the house seems to cover a period of about four years - from ten till fourteen. There's a continuity of thought there. I recognise this guy. Not the bloke from the love letters who was an empty space, this kid was a writer. He was trying things, he was stealing things, he was developing a style, a sensibility. 

I recognise all the swipes too. There's GRAND LARCENY on display. Not just the drawings but stolen jokes too, redressed; I made them my own. As the strips develop there are obvious lifts from Smudge, and The Bash Street Kids from The Beano. The tone is nicked from the weird picaresque Cheeky's Week comic strip, which was just a repository of bad gags, with a slightly Northern tone. Maybe I'm just projecting - these were old skool gags and so maybe I'm just hearing the rhythms of the Wheeltappers and Shunter's Club. There are other weirder things too: Dr Ratty Ratx in a strip called Rat-Trap in Cor!! comic. Frankie Stein and The Scream Inn were favourites, because they were monsters and ghosts, the former featuring the artwork of the brilliant, Ken Reid, who also drew the often hideous Faceache.

Alongside this was Asterix, an influence so profound that I remember trying to stand like him in primary school (hands behind back, knees bent - like I wasn't short enough). Through Asterix there were strange glances at a French school of illustration: Lucky Luke, Iznogoud and, best of all, Franquin's Gaston la Gaffe, which was never in English, and I have no idea where I could have seen it, but the memory is there, the evidence is there - I ripped it off without understanding a word. Perhaps there were copies in the foreign language section of Portslade Library, which was just down the end of our street and, and my home from home. With your hairy blue ticket you could gain access to other worlds: Agaton Sax, Help I'm a Prisoner in a Toothpaste factory! The Size Spies, Bobby Brewster, Snoggle, Tin Tin etc

There's a character in the comics whose face is a rip-off of Tweedledope from Captain Britain, a comic I would never have read, so I'm assuming I saw it in a print ad in the back of the black and white Marvel UK reprints which were the only comics I could afford. The face went in, context-free. He looked like a baddie, so a baddie he became.

There's my character "Nooligan", whose name I stole from a Roger McGough poem. I was a precocious child. I wonder where that precocity went? And what is precocity supposed to evolve into? Nooligan was stupid, wore a striped top and a furry waist-coat and carried a baguette sized stick to hit people with. I was always fascinated with violence as agency as a child: Obelix over Asterix, Lenny over George (I was familiar with Of Mice and Men from Loony Toons, in the same way I was aware of Wagner). I suppose it stems from my first love, spike haired delinquent Dennis the Menace, forever engaged in a one sided war against the poetry appreciating Softies. These days I am avowedly team Softy, but I've kept Dennis' haircut, and one of my most valued possessions is a now tiny red and black striped jumper my mum knitted for me. 

On my twelfth birthday I was introduced to the majesty of Mad magazine, and my comics became a lot more satirical and sophomoric, the humour surprisingly Jewish for a little fat goy from Brighton. There's also the creeping influence of Henry Beard's Bored of the Rings - I remember almost rupturing myself laughing at a description of a "great sonorous fart" in that book - I wasn't exclusively precocious. And Hitchhiker's Guide has to be in there, an indelible influence, which I can't seem to shake off. I can see it, even if no one else can. Douglas Adams' picaresque, making-it-up-as-he-goes-along plotting style has probably done more damage to my writing than anyone else. But at least he's funny, and funny books are so rare and so seemingly unpopular. Who else is funny? Wodehouse remains the brightest, sunniest writer, but who else is there? I could never bring myself to read Terry Pratchett, as he had a beard and wore a hat. My own notions of style and that old impostor cool, have kept me away from a lot of simple pleasures. I know now that I will never read Terry Pratchett and I don't feel too diminished by that. I also know that if I'd read it when I was twelve I would have adored it. 

The comics became spoofs, in the manner of Mad's film satires - often featuring the same jokes, lightly anglicized - and occasionally the same drawings. I recognize an alien being adapted from a Mort Drucker's drawing of Peter Sellers from Being There. There are balletic action sequences and fairly accurate pictures of cars, and I'm having fun with sound effects and editorial comments. One of the comic strips features my friend Gerard Morrison as secret agent, James Bandaid (!), complete with sunglasses, a tuxedo and white socks (it was the eighties, we all wore white socks). 

There's something desperately sad about a little boy, a teenager really, in exile, and drawing comic strips mythologizing the friends he misses. I don't think Gerard ever saw the stories either, which is sadder still. Maybe I lost my nerve. Maybe I thought it was uncool. I stopped drawing comic strips then and didn't draw another for a decade, when I self-published three issues of Trapped Hair, a comic full of indie music jokes in a pre-Britpop world, and featuring Paul Reverb*, as a gossamer veiled avatar for John Patrick Higgins. 

I think my mid-teens is when I lost my memory, or rather the certainty of memory. Nothing seemed fixed, and I was unmoored, floating through my life. I think now, that I was profoundly depressed, but I had neither the language to ask for help, nor the inclination. I became self-contained and silent. I barely spoke for two years. I didn't do anything creative, barring art lesson assignments: I became extremely proficient at drawing half bricks or shoes accurately. It's still the art my mum liked the most. I think she thought I'd gone badly off the boil when I started to "experiment". 

Going back and finding these things has been poignant, because I remember how desperately unhappy I was for a lot of the time. And how happy I had been when I first started drawing these things, when I could invent new worlds, when I could be funny and had an audience, and when writing led to reading which lead to more creativity, all of which was furiously exciting. These drawings mark a kind of childhood's end. You can see my joy twinkling out of existence, like dying stars in a distant galaxy. You can see me thinking "What is the point?" "Who are these things for?" "Why am I doing this childish nonsense." I used to love drawing those strips, drawing myself as the super-hero "Flamo-hair." I'd have been twelve, and it's possibly the last thing I drew before I put away childish things. Before I would go on to do badly in exams and to get a dull job in an office that I could barely do, and to stay there for fifteen years of my life. I could have been drawing and writing all that time. I might even have been good. 

And I might not have waited till my mid-forties before trying to write something.

But I did, and now I have to work a lot harder to make the time up. I'll give it a go. I might frame these comic strips, to remind me. Look at what you could have won. 

* I recently resurrected Paul Reverb for a series of comic misadventures undertaken by a lonely, middle-aged man. He no longer looks like me though. He's tall and dresses a bit like a mod. The book might be called "This is fine." How modish. In fact, Paul Reverb never really looked like me - I gave him the face of a young Sean Hughs.