What Rhymes with Bastard?

Part One:

1: Me, Jack, and Me and Jack

‘Don’t try and change anyone, Linda. I thought Icould change your father. You can’t do it.’

Mum

Before everything turned to shit, Jack was my most successful project ever. He was nineteen when I met him, and as much of a mess as his bedroom. Instead of buying food, he spent his student grant on speed, acid, ecstasy and marijuana, surviving on nibbles ‘borrowed’ from the communal fridge. He always left a regretful note, gracious but with no mention of imminent replacement:

Dear John,

I’m so sorry. I took your cheese.

Jack.

I started to collect them. I noticed he chain-smoked roll-ups, went to bed at nine a. m., and drew self-portraits in charcoal on his bedroom walls, incurring the wrath of the college authorities. A little crowd would gather in his room to witness his battles with the head cleaning lady: Brenda, screeching, hands on hips, Jack with his eyes still shut, making polite sounds from his bed. I found this endearing, but some of his strange practices were definitely negatives:

I considered this list, then I considered the positives: he was tall, handsome, gentle and sweet, and his ineptitude was charming. I knew a good fixer-upper when I saw one. With the maturity of a twenty-two-year-old I set about the repairs.

Five years later I had a fully functioning boyfriend, ensconced within a highly functional relationship, in which life tasks were assigned according to skill sets. Jack handled the higher issues, deciding which books and films were admirable, who was smart, what was right and – most importantly – what was wrong. I took care of the day-to-day stuff, selecting our clothes, furniture, housing, careers, friends and social activities. Household bills, naturally, were always in my name.

Thus far, my project had failed on only two fronts. The first of these was the inordinate amount of time Jack spent on writing projects. During a week-long holiday in 1998, he whiled away thirty-five documented hours writing a two-page letter to his best friend’s mum. Most of his spare time had been poured into a foot-high stack of works-in-progress. I had, admittedly, made some headway by turning him into a copywriter. Churning out text by the yard had increased his pace, but it was still a source of contention. My other failure was Jack’s smoking. He’d been at it for fifteen years and already had circulation problems – a large varicose vein had appeared in his crotch, coiling across his scrotum and up his cock like a power cable.

Achieving this tightly regulated relationship hadn’t been easy. About three months into our courtship, he went temporarily insane and had to be locked up. It was the Easter holidays, and I was stuck at Mum and Dad’s house, waiting for my new boyfriend to arrive from London. By the time he was eight hours late6, I gave up, dried my tears and went off to visit a friend in Southampton. Mum phoned us later that afternoon.

‘Hello, darling,’ she said. ‘I’ve just had a call from a girl who said she was ringing from a mental hospital in Woking. She said she was a fellow patient of your friend Jack’s. What should I do?’

The next day, I drove the hundred miles to the hospital, where I found my new boyfriend hopping round a traffic cone. ‘Hi, Bunny!’ Still hopping, he jiggled my shoulders. I asked him what had happened.

‘The pigs got me!’

‘How did they get you, Jack?’

‘Ha ha! They said, “You can do this the easy way or the hard way,” and I said, “The hard way!” So they beat me up, but it took three of them! Look!’ He showed me a nasty crop of bruises.

Later I pieced together the events: after taking the usual cocktail of speed, acid, dope and ecstasy, he had gone to London and begun a mystical quest for his dad, whom he had never met. He decided his philosophy professor was the most likely candidate, and wrote him a series of impassioned letters, hanging some on trees and posting others, which were later returned in a sealed envelope. He walked around naked in High Barnet, reciting from