A Fucked Up Life in Books Read online

  A FUCKED UP LIFE IN BOOKS

  Anonymous

  To Boy, love from Stumpy

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Childhood and school

  Owl at Home

  Mr Meddle’s Muddles

  Burglar Bill

  Thelwell’s Riding Academy

  Flight of Dragons

  Goosebumps

  Grimms’ Fairytales

  The Silver Brumby

  The Diary of Adrian Mole

  Angela’s Ashes

  Stark

  The Caucasian Chalk Circle

  Birdsong

  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

  Wizard’s First Rule

  Liverpool Daisy

  Towards Tomorrow

  Teenage years and university

  Beloved

  A Game of You

  The Princess Bride

  Howards End

  Stone of Tears

  Wild Swans

  The Dice Man

  The Lord of the Rings

  Trainspotting

  Lolita

  Smoke and Mirrors

  The Da Vinci Code

  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

  Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales

  Confessor

  Guards! Guards!

  Nineteen Eighty-Four

  A proper grown-up

  A Prayer for Owen Meany

  A Hell on Earth

  The Eye of the World

  A Wild Sheep Chase

  Delta of Venus

  Twilight

  The Godfather

  Beowulf

  Memoirs of a Geisha

  A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian

  Dragon’s Gold

  Brick Lane

  Persepolis

  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

  Glamorama

  A Game of Thrones

  The Master and Margarita

  The Periodic Table

  Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

  How To Be a Woman

  A Dance with Dragons

  All My Friends Are Superheroes

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  I started writing a blog because I wanted to talk about books anonymously. The reason I did it anonymously was because I didn’t, and still don’t really, think that I am at all clever or insightful enough to have decent opinions on books. If I love them, I can’t really tell you why; and if I hate them I tend to just swear a lot and get frustrated. The best and most fitting anonymous name that I could think of for me was BookCunt. I fucking love books and I have a cunt. Job done.

  The first book I reviewed was The Tiny Wife by Andrew Kaufman that had been given to me by a friend. After I reviewed that I didn’t really know what else to do. I didn’t have any other new books to review, and no one really knew about the blog so I wasn’t getting sent any review copies by anyone, so I posted a story about the time that a man chased me down the street because of Isaac Asimov. People liked it, they thought it was funny. And it was easy to write because it was true. It had happened just before I left to go to university as I was hanging around in town trying to find a job to make some money so that when I got to university I had some money to piss away. So, I asked my (ten or so) followers on Twitter what they wanted from the blog; did they want book reviews or did they want stories? And they all said stories, which was fine by me because I had a fucking shitload in my head just ready to tell. I carried on with reviews, as I started to get authors and publishers sending me things to read, but every Saturday I’d post a story of something that had happened to me.

  I can remember every single book I’ve ever read, and I can remember where I was and what I was doing while I was reading them all. This is a collection of my stories, some that have been posted on my blog and some that have not, of some of the mental shit that has happened to me. They’re not all directly about me, sometimes I was just observing. And some of the links to books are pretty tenuous. But they’re all true and they’re all as honest as I can be with a bunch of strangers on the internet. I don’t think that my life has been as fucked up and mental as some of these stories would suggest. I don’t think that I’m the only person that this sort of stuff happens to, and I don’t think that any of it is particularly new or exciting. It’s just a bunch of stuff that has happened over the last 27 years, to someone who has spent most of their life hiding behind the pages of a book. Some of it makes me sad and makes me cry, and some of it makes me feel so fucking lucky to have been there. All of it is given to you, with love, from an anonymous book blogger.

  BookCunt, August 2012

  Childhood and school

  Owl at Home

  The first book I ever remember reading is Owl At Home, by Arnold Lobel. I’m not sure whether I ever actually read it as a child, or whether it was read to me so much that I memorised the words, but I did used to sit and turn the pages and recite the stories from it. I don’t know where the copy came from, but it is full of library stamps, which means that my Mum or possibly my Grandma probably got it from a library sale to read to me. I’ve still got my copy of the book. It currently sits on my bookcase nestled in amongst the rest. But Owl At Home is more special than the others, because it is my oldest book and because it features in my earliest memory.

  I must have been about three years old. I used to sit in the garden, reading Owl At Home out to myself. We had a pretty big garden, and I was sitting in the middle of the lawn. Mum was in the kitchen preparing dinner, Dad was at work, and my younger brother was zipping about all over the patio in his walker.

  I wasn’t particularly fond of him at the time. He was always in the way, he smelt, and in that walker he could come at you out of nowhere pretty fast. When I was on the lawn he couldn’t get to me. At the end of the patio was a path. The path led down to where the big bin was – one of those metal jobbies with a lid with a handle, like they had in Stomp. You couldn’t see the path from the kitchen window. I looked up from my book just in time to see my brother, in his walker, zooming down the path.

  It was Thursday. Bin day. Instead of the bin at the end of the path there was an empty space, an empty space where the path abruptly ended leaving a little step and a small hole. I watched him get to the end of the path, watched the front wheel of the walker drop down into the hole and all of a sudden my brother was horizontal and screaming his fucking head off. I glanced to the kitchen window. I could see Mum chopping vegetables. I could hear music, she was listening to a tape, the one that I called Coca Cola (Peanut Man by Tim Buckley). She couldn’t hear my brother crying in the hole. I put my book down and walked over to him to have a look. He looked like a twat. Red-faced and crumpled eyes from all the tears. One of his shoes had fallen off. I picked up the shoe and headed for the kitchen. Mum was dancing around. I handed her the shoe. She shouted at me ‘Why have you taken your brother’s shoe? For God’s sake, Jesus …’ and headed outside to replace the shoe. I followed her.

  She saw my brother, screaming in the hole. She gasped, ‘Fuck’, but instead of going to help him dashed back inside. I waited outside. She came back moments later with a camera, walked towards the hole, took a picture, and then lifted my brother out of the walker, pulled the walker out of the hole and popped him back in it, giving him a little shove towards the safety of the patio. He promptly shut his fat face and started wandering around the patio, as if nothing had happened. Mum went back to chopping the vegetables and dancing to Tim Buckley, and I went back on to the lawn to finish reading Owl At Home.

  Mr Meddle’s Muddles

  I grew up most
ly in the garden. We lived in the countryside, fucking miles away from anything. My best friend was my brother and my second best friend was the cat. On the right hand side we had an elderly neighbour, and on the left a newly engaged couple. My brother and I were the only children and so spent our days playing together.

  It wasn’t bad growing up in the garden, because it was a shit-hot garden: a big lawn and loads of trees and flowers and bushes. A vegetable patch at the back, a patio at the front. Plenty of space for running around and hiding from each other and finding new things to discover.

  My parents had bought us a Wendy house each. I say Wendy house, but mine was some plastic sticks assembled into a house-like shape with a canvas slung over the top that was decorated like a house, with windows and a roof and all of that kind of shit. My brother’s was a tipi, a bunch of plastic sticks that met at the top with a similar canvas sheet thrown over the top with decoration on.

  When you’re playing in the same garden every single day you have to get creative with your games. On this day, I’d decided (I made almost all of the decisions) that my brother and I were going to play ‘decorate the houses and then move in and be neighbours’. First things first: decorate the houses.

  I had this wonderful picture in my head of daisies growing around the bottom of my house. As daisies don’t just grow where you want them to, this meant picking daisies and placing them around the edges. I decided that instead of daisies that my brother should decorate around his tipi with tufts of grass, because daisies were a bit girly and also because I didn’t need the little shit taking any of my precious daisies.

  Now, being a clever and scheming child, I knew that picking enough daisies would take a fucking age. I also knew that picking grass was a piece of piss. So, I lied to my brother. I told him that he could decorate with daisies and I’d decorate with grass, so he’d better pick all the daisies from the lawn and put them in a basket, and I’d do the same but instead fill a basket with grass. We got to work.

  After ten minutes my basket was overflowing with grass, but my brother, having to painstakingly pick each daisy one by one, was not doing so well. His basket didn’t even have the bottom covered in daisies.

  I told him to hurry up and that I was moving in now. I went inside and picked up my things. Into my lovely house went Mr Meddle’s Muddles, a swan Keyper (do you remember those toys, Keypers?), a notepad and pen, and the cat. The cat did not stay in the house for long.

  Even after I’d moved in my brother was still picking daisies. He was so slow and shit. I went into my house and looked at the pictures in Mr Meddle and waited for him to finish. After what felt like hours, he came to show me how much he’d got.

  It wasn’t great, to be honest, but he’d probably been at it two hours and I really needed to decorate my house. So I took the basket from him and told him that there had been a change of plan and that he was decorating with grass and I’d have all these daisies. He was not happy.

  He screamed at me that they were his. I told him that no, the grass was his, he didn’t want flowers to decorate a tipi anyway.

  Unfortunately, being my only friend, he knew my weakness: the flowers that hung up on the side of the wall of the house to dry. That old woman that lived on the right was teaching me about drying and pressing flowers and all of the other shit that old ladies do because they are bored to tears. He told me he was going to pull the flowers down, and began to stride purposefully towards the house.

  Little cunt.

  He was angrier and quicker than me, but he was also shorter. He got to the wall of the house, reached up his hand to destroy my hard work and I came up behind him, snatched my flowers away, and smashed his head against the brick wall of the house.

  I don’t know why at the age of four my first instinct was to smash his head against the wall rather than just take the flowers and run. I wonder now why my brain had managed to make my first instinct so violent.

  He screamed. He screamed so fucking loud that it scared me. I ran to the bottom of the garden and climbed up a tree. I couldn’t see him any more, but I could hear my Mum shriek as she found him. I waited in the tree for what felt like forever until my Dad came and found me and told me to come inside, my brother had gone to accident and emergency with mum and that we were having pizza for dinner.

  When I got to the patio before going through the back door I noticed some splashes of blood on the tiles. No one had told me off though. If anyone asked then I’d just say he tripped.

  Mum came home with my brother. He was not talking to me. He’d had to have stitches in his forehead. We all ate pizza for dinner and I didn’t get told off. I don’t think at the time that he had told anyone what happened. As I got older I felt guilty that no one knew what I’d done.

  Almost a year ago to the day my brother visited my flat in London and stayed over because he was working nearby the next day. He pulled out of his bag a package wrapped in dinosaur wrapping paper and told me that it was my birthday present. I could open it now or later. It didn’t matter.

  My birthday wasn’t for another six weeks, so I chose later. That evening I sat in my flat with my brother and we drank some wine and watched some TV, just what we do any time he visits. And when I left for work in the morning I said bye without saying thanks for my birthday present, which sat at the foot of my bookshelves waiting to be opened.

  Six weeks after he visited it was my birthday. I sat in my flat with my boyfriend opening my presents. I’d left the one from my brother until last.

  I tore off the dinosaur wrapping paper, and the masses of bubble wrap underneath and found this:

  It’s a poem that he wrote for me, in a clip frame. A poem about that day when I smashed his head against the wall, and about our childhood together and about some of the shit that has happened between then and now. And it’s fucking wonderful, and as much as I’d like to write it all down for you to show you I won’t, because it’s mine. But I’ll give you the last two lines.

  ‘… Of each other’s part we played alongside the games those childhood ways the times we’d play, Hide away all night and day from our important lives.’

  Now, have a closer look.

  Burglar Bill

  I was in reception when I met my first love. He was in year one so we didn’t share a classroom, but we used to see each other in the playground and would poke around at the worms on the concrete together, or make aliens out of the grass cuttings on the field. He was the most handsome boy in school, and all of my friends were well jealous.

  At the end of one day, the school sent letters home with us about helping to litter pick on the field at lunchtime the following day. Mum asked me if I wanted to do it, and I did. She packed some gloves into my schoolbag so that I didn’t scratch my hands on the bushes and didn’t touch anything unsavoury.

  The day of the litter pick our teacher was reading us Burglar Bill before our morning break. She was one of those teachers that fucking loved reading out to us, and after reading out each page she would turn the book around and sweep it slowly in front of us all sitting on the carpet so that we could see the pictures. Then we went out for break.

  I found him waiting by the water fountain. He asked what story we’d had and I told him it was Burglar Bill. Then he told me that we weren’t allowed to play on the field at lunchtime. I told him I was allowed to go on the field because I was going to litter pick. He looked at me a bit funny.

  ‘Why do you want to litter pick, I thought we were going to play?’ he said.

  ‘Because my Mum asked me and I said yes. She’s packed my gloves. I think it will be fun, did your Mum forget to pack your gloves?’ I asked.

  He scrunched up his face at me.

  ‘I don’t want to litter pick, it’s stupid. It’s a stupid game and the stupid teachers are doing it.’ He said.

  I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I’d told my Mum I wanted to do it and she’d packed my gloves. I’d given my little slip with her signature on it to the teacher saying that I
was going to help out. There was no way out.

  ‘Maybe if I pick up all the litter really fast it will all be gone and then I can come and play!’ I told him.

  He looked really, really grumpy.

  ‘No you won’t. We won’t get to play. I don’t think I love you anymore.’

  Fucking hell. Heartbreak.

  ‘But I thought you were my boyfriend?’ I said.

  ‘Well if you go and pick litter then we won’t get to play and you won’t be my girlfriend any more,’ he said.

  ‘But I have to pick litter!’ I shouted.

  He shrugged and walked away from me.

  At lunchtime I headed out with the other volunteers and picked crisp packets and other shit out of the thorny bushes. I looked over at the playground and there he was, poking at the worms with my best friend. Traitor. Cunt.

  We didn’t talk at school anymore after that. And when I went into year six he went to a secondary school. And when I went to secondary school it was a different one to him.

  I saw him a few years later when I was about fifteen and out playing and called him a fucking bastard. He said that he was sorry. I got off with him for a bit, but he wasn’t very handsome anymore so I sacked him off after a couple of weeks. We didn’t want the same things, anyway. I still wanted to pick litter and he still wanted to flirt with my mates. Young love, eh?