Poet, Novelist, and Critic

IAN GREGSON

NOT TONIGHT, NEIL (published by Cinnamon Press. more….)

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Text Box: 1 It all hinges on the sound that Helen made that night, and whether it was different from other cries I’d heard her make, whether it was a scream of fear and pain instead of a cry of orgasmic thrill. She disappeared soon afterwards so I had to think about that noise and whether it had a different edge. It’s also about the guilt I felt, knowing I was involved, and whether it was that which has led to how crippled I’ve become. Helen and Neil were the young couple who lived next door, they’d moved there in about 1965 when I was twelve or maybe thirteen, and their bed was next to mine. It was in another house, but still it was next to mine because it was next to the adjoining wall, and so was mine. Often over the years it was as though the three of us were in the same bed. I heard their conversations: Neil’s seductive endearments, Helen’s throaty giggles, her angry refusals and sometimes his when she was demanding, their laughter and romping, their shouts of argument. Their voices would often start when I was asleep and mingle with my dreams and once or twice I woke and I’d come at the same time as them, and was part of the sighs of the satisfied afterwards. I stroked the wall, often, and its knobbly woodchip, and it turned to flesh. Deep in the night, the wall softened and warmed and quivered; it was so diaphanously thin that their breath brushed against my face and blew into my ears. Their move into the bed beside me coincided with my puberty and Text Box: in retrospect it feels as though it made my puberty happen, that it was the knowledge I gained from their closeness to me that propelled the hormones around my body, so that I grew a foot taller and my voice deepened, and stubble pushed its way out of my jaw. They were distant as well as close. Sometimes the wall was a gulf, and I couldn’t quite catch their words, or suspected I might’ve mistaken a word for its rhyme: love for stuff or tough or rough; money for dummy or sunny or crummy - or even Tony; Tony for bony or phoney or baloney. But Helen and Neil have influenced me so much that even now, in my forties, when I think about sex, and when I’m doing sex, I still often hear their bedsprings creak, an arm hit the wall, a breathless grunt. Like a sex scene on the radio, if such a thing was ever broadcast, a sex scene on the radio heard on headphones to bring it right up close. The influence of my mum and dad, in comparison, is nothing: I always ignored their advice, and I was right. But its tangling up with Helen’s death - if I ever got counselling that’s what I need to address. Some of the people who know me say that that’s why I’m fucked up, and it’s why I’m a cartoonist, because that’s what cartoons express, it’s why they’re so ugly and childish, and so driven by rage and fear. Instead of seeing a psychiatrist I drew a series of comic strips starring Helen, Neil and me. I’d published cartoons before in satirical mags and occasionally in newspapers but nothing on this scale. I called it Noises Through the Wall and it was serialized in Red Stoat and then I published it as a book in 1994, and it’s the main reason why I’m becoming famous. It was controversial because it was about real events, but ‘irreverent’, a cartoon where the wall had a face, a voyeuristic teenager whose pimples were woodchip, and whose drives were gross. And two or three of the characters who appear in the book don’t like it at all.

Chapter 1. An excerpt from my new novel.