PINS - Rule Fifty: Despair

(Look at the family she's married into!)

There are parts of every game when you despair and nearly give up. PINS is no different. We note that the maker of the game never got very far with the rules. But he was too busy dreaming his forces and maps up to think too much about despair.

Still: there is no fun at the free festival in the park. You go home, eating a bag o’ dabs on the way back. A great gloom descends over you; this decade’s hedonism is not your scene. You are drunk daily, all the time, and you feel no affinity with anyone in this town. You’ve been told your father “had a wobble” in his twenties when “no one would have him”. That’s when he sported a beard, but that was the very early 1960s and all the pretentious people did that then.

“Anyway there was this programme on the telly about Stalin, talking about when his first wife died, and he is supposed to have said, ‘all love died inside me from that point and I became like a stone’ or summat or other and that’s exactly, exactly, how I feel now. Even with you. At least you listen. I can’t understand other people, I can’t really abide them, I can’t see how I am supposed to be nice to them let alone marry one and be happy about it. I’ve got my whole life in front of me and I have to get on with other people, I feel like giving up.”

Well I was fourteen and I was suddenly the head of the family, and I had to look after my mother and the boys. I had to hold my mother, she was all gone and couldn’t stop weeping for days. And my dad was shot, he was finished - he went to bed for what could have been a year, that’s why he slept so late when you knew him.  

“After a while, I think in my late forties, I thought, oh, I just give up. All these awful chores. Why put the effort in?”

TELL HER NOT TO WORRY NO, NOT TO WORRY [This high-pitched voice, with a pronounced guttural, rhotic R is not your voice, but it’s coming out of your mouth.]  

“You will find someone I promise, but you will never be happy like other people. But that’s not really what you want, is it?” 

You go back to the house with the fish and chips which you share out between the pair of you. Bread and butter as a side. The place is not as it was, it never has been, really, these last two years. You can see the slow decline around the place, unopened letters, things not chucked away, half-eaten food and washing up. Dead flowers, dried-out pot plants, sprouting spuds under the sink, and an overgrown garden. He had his tumble playing a part in a Bible class for the tots at the local church. The car’s still down there. Only one thing to do, make a flask, turn the BBC World Service on all night and try to doze off. And in the morning clean from top to bottom. Get on your knees, scrub the skirting boards, and get a warm wet cloth over the carpets on the landing. You’ll have to go down the sides of those cupboards too, and the bath needs elbow grease. It’s the only thing to do.

I’ll be alright, you know. I’ve slept on a car and an upright snooker table. This is nothing.

I found her in the street absolutely drunk, she said she wanted to kill herself, I had to right her, and get her on the bus home. There was a black cloud round her that summer. 

A friend said, it’s an odd and contradictory time when you lose a parent. And he’s right. I notice I’m spending a lot of time listening to the floorboards. In the front bedroom they have a drawn-out, medium-pitched sigh. In the back room they have a sharp, barking sound. The stairs have a muffled crump to them. I spent a lot of time listening out for them, even though I am alone. I noticed in hindsight that I was constantly aroused that week, even with the smell of death still around, downstairs. 

Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling

From glen to glen, and down the mountainside,

The summer’s gone, and all the roses falling,

It’s you, it’s you must go, and I must bide.

But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow,

Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow,

Tis I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow,

Oh, Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, I love you so!

But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying,

If I am dead, as dead I well may be,

Ye’ll come and find the place where I am lying,

And kneel and say an Ave there for me;

And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,

And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be,

For you will bend and tell me that you love me,

And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me!

And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me!

Come to me!

An accompanying post to this Rule, with relevant illustrations, can be found in the Museum of Photocopies.