Dodgy

I am not dodgy, but I suffer from a syndrome which makes people think I am. No – that’s not it. I suffer from a syndrome which makes me suspect people will think I am, so they often do. I cannot help it. How else can you explain the fact that I have had, oh, six, seven GPs in my life, in different quarters of the country, and not one of them has ever given me painkillers more potent than an aspirin?

People I have worked with, eaten with, drunk with, owed money to, held the hair away from the faces from while they vomited sobbing upon the shoes belonging thereto, tiny, wee, beret-wearing ladies with art portfolios, and hard, scarred, Lurch-like figures with putty skin and sudden twitches – I have known these people in the time they went to see their physicians with a sore knee or a nagging tooth, and walked away with a script for the hard stuff, the girl, the sugar, the yen shee, the bosoms of Miss More-fer-ya. Free as that. Whoo – they’ve said to me, or things like that, later on at work, shining from the breakfast flight, pupils like pimples, grins the width of the Limpopo, as if they’re not rubbing in at all. Oh no.

Me, though – just circumcised? Here’s some paracetamol. Tonsilitis, is it? Rest and fluids, there’s a good chap – yes, even though you can’t currently swallow without fainting from the pain. And: I can see that one half of your foot has gone quite black and you cannot stand on it, Mr Baylis, so here is a download code for a mindfulness podcast. Next!

It is probably a good idea, though. In my time I have been hooked on Hill Street Blues, a Vick's Inhaler, chicken curry from one particular restaurant and the smell of boot polish. And a few days into a long spell in South East Asia, I once hopped off the back of a moped to visit a hole in the wall pharmacy, because I wanted some paracetamol. ‘Why not morphine?’ the pharmacist said. ‘Strong-strong. Very good. You try.’ He knew.

The GPs do not know, they just know that I know. This is what they pick up on, with their Hippocratic antennae. It is not unlike membership of Calvin’s Elect, the virtuous handful who are definitely on their way to heaven. You cannot know that you are one of the Elect, but since certain faith is one of the most obvious components of the entry fee, then doubting it is a pretty clear sign that you’re aren’t getting in. Why does this man look like he thinks I won’t believe him, the doctors wonder.

Worse still are border points and customs desks. ‘It’s because of the beard.’ People have said this to me. Also: ‘It’s because of the moustache,’ or ‘It’s because you look like you’ve just shaved off your beard and moustache in a hurry’ - which is often true. ‘You are NOT going through in that coat,’ my wife will say sometimes. But the truth is, it wouldn’t matter what I wore on my face or body – they would stop me. I exude the musk of dodginess. Or of assumed dodginess. Or the musk of the fear of assumed dodginess.

What’s more, because such officials pride themselves on their finely honed instincts (you can imagine how boring it gets when the Stansted Customs crew go out for a Friday piss-up), they get distinctly miffed when these instincts turn out to be wrong. How can they be – they think. There must be something else, something hidden somewhere else. They never want to let me go.

En route to Amsterdam once, I watched as the wintry face of a freckled Scots pat-down expert passed from dismay to triumph, as he let me go, then spotted something poking out of my pocket as I left his company. ‘AAAND WHAT HAVE WE GOT HERE?!’ he cried, like a conjuror.

The entire hall looked up and stared, expecting white rabbits, a string of flags, a kilo of Peruvian blue. It was a small bottle of contact lens cleaning fluid. Before the liquids ban, this wasn’t even something he could confiscate. He looked so upset I almost felt sorry for him. I also made the mistake of telling him so. He leant in close. ‘Aye, an’ I’ll be on here Sunday night when ye come back threugh,’ he grated. He was not, in fact, but I would learn from his colleagues on the Sunday night shift that it is not wise to wind them up, or to be wound up by them.

Another pivotal point along this journey of learning came when I was going to Paris with a girlfriend. It was the first time we had been away together. Also the first time I had travelled on the Eurostar and the first time anyone had mysteriously upgraded me to First Class. For all this novelty, the Euro-experience was just a part of Waterloo Station back then, so it felt no more like international travel than taking the 9.03 to Woking. So I was actually quite shocked to go through scanners and emerge, blinking, into this dazzling bright hall of men in their white, short-sleeved shirts and their metal tables, eyeing you up as if they might be about to administer a very painful massage. (As sometimes, I suppose, they do.)

But even when one ruddy and bearded, slightly nautical looking soul pulled me over, I wasn’t that worried because he said he was just intending to swab my bag for traces of explosives. A random spot-check, he said. ‘Nice hunting bag,’ he went on, as he readied his instrument, which was like a sponge on a stick. ‘Do you go hunting?’
‘I just like the bags,’ I said.
‘You sure?’ he asked, genially, showing me his sponge, which had turned a funny colour. ‘Because it’s come up positive. Not been shooting at all? Clay pigeons, stag weekend type of thing…?’
‘No, sorry.’
He went and muttered something to someone, and came back with a new sponge on a stick.
‘Oh my God why?’ my girlfriend asked. ‘You told me about this. I just thought you were joking. He said he always gets stopped,' she added, as the naval chap returned and proceeded to swab my hands.
‘Does he?’ the bloke said, gazing hard at me.

I was escorted to a side office. I didn’t know where my girlfriend had gone. Paris, perhaps. I didn’t like the look of the rubbery hospital screen folded up in a corner of the room, or the various laws of Her Majesty’s United Kingdom on laminated bits of card. And I liked, even less than all of those things, the bloke in the charcoal suit who came in with a clipboard. I don’t quite know why, but there was something of the mediaeval woodcut about his face and hairdo – you could imagine him in a leather jerkin, poking heretics with a poker.

He did not introduce himself, just sat down and began to read questions out, at me. ‘Have you been in contact with fireworks in the last seven days? Have you visited a factory where fireworks might be made, or a business or storage facility where they might be kept? Have you handled live or blank ammunition? Have you recently deployed a distress flare, been present as one was deployed, or shared equipment or accommodation with a person or persons who may have had reason to deploy or to possess a distress flare?’
‘No to all,’ I said.
‘You sure?’ He abandoned his list for a moment. ‘Been on a yacht? Sailing boat? Fishing trip, even one of those river cruises… It can happen. You sit on the box where the flares are kept. You put on a lifejacket that’s been next to them…’ He took on an almost magnanimous air, as if making me a series of dazzling offers. ‘You borrow a waterproof, or a blanket. Cook something in the galley. They often keep the flares in the galley. It happens.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
‘Not in the Reserves? Used or visited a firing range for any purpose? Been abseiling or rock climbing in the vicinity of an active quarry or M.O.D. base?’
He was getting miffed now. Something in his tone – the way he had begun to sigh before each new question and to shut his eyes after every one of my answers – suggested that I was pushing my luck. That there could be no man alive, surely, who had not hunted, shot, fished, sailed, abseiled or visited a fireworks factory, firing range, active quarry or M.O.D. base within the last week. I had encountered this before with men who wanted to talk to me about football, and refused to believe that they could not. Irritation plus puzzled hurt. Or, in the case of the garrulous Greek Cypriot man who cut my hair once a month for several years, blank disregard. He just carried on talking about football.


As official's sighing went on, his breath filled the little room. It was the breath of someone who has had three or four lattes, but not eaten breakfast. I suspected that he was probably not going to get his bacon roll until I was either freed or sent down.
‘Alright,’ he said, slamming his palms on the table. It was as if he was about to put a deal to me, or do that thing where they tell you what will happen to someone as pretty as you in the Scrubs. But he didn’t seem to have anything to say. He flipped over a page, and began on a new list of questions.
‘Do you handle or have you handled, or have you come into contact with somebody who handles or has handled potassium iodide?’
‘Er, no.’
‘The Calcium Acetates?’
‘No?’ I wondered why the Acetates got a ‘The’, like one of those early Motown girl bands. Were they especially sexy?
‘2-naptha Hydroxy Methyl Sulphate?’
‘No.’
‘Radioactive isotopes?’
‘I hope not.’
‘When and where did you last have an X-ray?’
‘I don’t know, years ago. At school.’
He looked up. ‘They X-rayed you at your school?’
‘No, I mean I was at school at the time. The hospital will have been in Merseyside, I guess.’
'Merseyside,' he repeated, meaningfully, as if I'd said Raqqa. 'Is that an actual place?'
'It's a county, yes. Like Tyneside.'
'Except that isn't a county,' he said. 'I'm from Consett,' he added, then suddenly asked, ‘Do you ever experiment with chemicals?’
‘What?’
‘It happens. Some people just try it in their sheds, to see what happens.’

I was struggling now. Did he mean ‘experiment with chemicals’ and ‘see what happens’ as in, ‘try and make LSD with some mouldy bread’? Or some wider, Renaissance-style ‘compare the action of acids and alkalis on a soft metal compound’? And what people, for the love of Christ? What people, in their sheds?
'No. And we actually had to write that in the front of our exercise books, in our first chemistry lesson,’ I said. ‘Never put two chemicals together just to see what happens.’
‘So you liked chemistry.’
‘I hated it. Writing that in the exercise book is the only thing I can remember from three years of it.’

That wasn’t true, actually. I also remembered: the smell of a ‘splint’ (aka, the bit of wood inexplicably used to light things in a way that was less reliable, more messy and more smelly than doing it with a match); the smell of a bunsen burner; the smell of a Chemistry teacher’s old tweed jacket, a compound of wet wool, wet dog, chalk, spilt coffee, and The Calcium Acetates; the end-of-term treat, which involved trooping out to the field to watch some sort of minor explosion, created, of course, by means of the very practice we had sworn in writing not to engage in, ie adding one chemical to another to see what would happen. In fairness to all Chemistry teachers, though, they weren’t dumping a fistful of sodium in a pint of sulphuric acid to see what would happen, because they already knew what would happen and that it was, unlike pretty much the whole of the rest of the Chemistry 'O' level syllabus, a bit interesting to watch.

‘Do you use herbicides, pesticides or insecticides?’
Only if the off-licence is shut. I didn’t say that. He stopped asking me questions and made some notes. He had strangely beautiful handwriting, but I couldn’t read it.
‘When can I go? I’m trying to catch a train to Paris.’
‘You tell us why you’re covered in explosive residue, and we’ll tell you if you can go to Paris. It’s that simple.’ He put the cap on his biro. I sensed he was going to leave me for his bacon roll, and lock the door.
But there was a commotion outside. Not really – it was my girlfriend and she didn’t do commotions, but she was trying to explain something quite forcefully to someone on the other side of the door, and after trying to talk over her for a short while, it seemed that the person had learnt his lesson and was listening, and was sorry. Then there was a knock. My interrogator slipped outside, more urgent voices, before the door opened, and he slipped back in.
‘What about the play? Your Missus says were in a play. Where someone was shot.’

I racked my brains. I could only think of one play. ‘”Blood Brothers”? I wasn’t in it. I was back stage. But there was nothing for me to do back stage, so I sold ice lollies.’
‘And this was when?’
‘1985?’
He left the room in disgust, then returned.
‘It was last week,’ he said, accusingly.
‘Well, it wasn’t. It was 1985.’
There was hammering on the door. My girlfriend shouted something like ‘Not him, the sofa!’
The man’s eyes narrowed. ‘It was a play with sofas in it?’
‘KIPPERS.’
It was an odd thing for my girlfriend to shout. Especially there and then. I’ll warrant it’s the only time someone has shouted KIPPERS through a door in the Eurostar Terminal. At the same time, it was helpful.
‘Oh God. I lent my sofa to a friend who wanted it for a play.'
'Last week?' He was, rather pointedly, not taking notes.
'He had it for about eight weeks, and he brought it back in the van when the play ended last week. And it stank. It really stank like kippers. He said it was cordite, because there were all these gunshots and explosions in it.’
He was doing a doodle on his pad now. 'How did you manage without a sofa for eight weeks?’
‘It wasn’t my main sofa.’
‘Wasn’t?’
‘Isn’t.’ What was he implying? A Freudian slip because I’d actually slit the sofa’s throat and dumped it in a skip? ‘It’s very small and old – that’s why he wanted it.’
He hadn’t finished. He hadn't taken a single note since the word KIPPERS had been uttered, but now he wanted to know the name of the play and the theatre. Mercifully, fringe theatre venues in the attics of Hackney pubs being what they are, the website still had all the details of the now-ended show, a warning for faint-hearted types about the bangs and flashes, and even a shot of the stage set, sofa, cello, guillotine and all. You could also, allegedly, book and pay for a ticket for the show that was no longer on – which really, tells you a lot about the cultural scene in Hackney.

More to the point, he let me go. We had missed our Paris train by four minutes. My girlfriend told him this as he walked us to the empty platform.
‘You could have been on it if you’d been honest from the start,’ he said, brutishly.
‘How were we dishonest? What reason would either of us have had to be dishonest?’ She had legal training, my girlfriend. But the official was undaunted.
‘You tell me, love. Maybe one of you didn’t really want to go to Paris.’
‘What?’
‘I’m telling you,’ he said. ‘You spent a day in my job, you’d see. People get themselves caught so they don't have to go on holiday, don't have to get married, so they can get out of the honeymoon. It happens. And you can spot em a mile off,' he added. 'They just look - dodgy.’