You Are Awful (But I Like You) Read online

  ‘Run by daft buggers this toon, man. A bloody dump and all. No walk, no money. You live rune dear?’ I raised a finger and opened my mouth, but had time to emit no more than a small cloud of vapour. ‘You don’t want to stay, man. See that rude?’ He waved a dismissive astrakhan cuff at the plain and dreary thoroughfare outside the gates. ‘Whole thing wants bloody nockerndoon. All you’ve got from one end to the bloody other is bloody teaker-wheeze. Not even a decent fission-chip. All teaker-whee bloody kebabs and bloody parmos.’

  I’d spotted this mysterious word in the windows of many such local establishments, and seized the opportunity to ask for an explanation, and to sound like Prince Charles on a regional walkabout in doing so. ‘Parmo? Bloody crap, man. Foreign crap. Some horrible bloody foreign idea with chicken and foreign bloody sweaty-foot cheese. Smells worse than bloody Billingham chemical works.’ I was, of course, now duty bound to put this verdict to the test, and so some hours later pulled up in the dark outside a dazzling cathedral city of steam and light, with a horrible bloody foreign idea in my lap.

  Even by the stunted health and safety standards of Victorian industry, a chemical plant was a particularly terrible place to earn a living. Work long enough processing white phosphorus – as many thousands did in match factories – and you would succumb to ‘phossy jaw’, a flesh-eating disfigurement which gave off an appalling stench and glowed in the dark. A chromium worker was readily identifiable by the misshapen hole in his face that had once been a nose. Opened in 1833, when workplace protection meant a baker’s boy hat and the Lord’s Prayer, Middlesbrough’s first chemical plant produced sulphuric acid.

  As you’d hope and expect, conditions steadily improved thereafter, but never to the point where a Teesside mother would weep tears of joy at the news that her son or daughter had begun a career at Wilton or Billingham, the two sprawling chemical complexes that by the 1950s had established themselves as the town’s dominant employers. As the chorus to a self-evidently unofficial ‘ICI Song’ of this era cheerily put it, ‘Every day you’re in this place, you’re two days nearer death.’

  It was perhaps with this in mind that Middlesbrough so recklessly embraced the escalope parmesan, a dish decreed by North Yorkshire Trading Standards to incorporate nearly twice the recommended daily allowance of fat for an adult male. So my subsequent research revealed, along with a potted history of this regional fast-food phenomenon, created by an American army chef who settled in Middlesbrough after the war. Swiftly abbreviated to ‘parmo’, Nicos Harris’s recipe was a cheerfully dumbed-down take on an Italian classic: a veal fillet coated with batter and breadcrumbs, then deep fried, topped with béchamel sauce and parmesan, baked briefly in a pizza oven and laid on a bed of chips. Ignore the original garnish of choice – who on earth let creamed cabbage into the world? – and it doesn’t sound at all bad.

  I placed my order knowing none of this, nor the bit that described the half-sized dish I’d opted for as a ‘ladies’ parmo’. It was prepared backstage at one of the many Asian-run outlets that now dominate the local parmo scene by an unsmiling wobble-chops who left me alone for fifteen long minutes at the counter, there to contemplate the many other dishes I might have ordered from him in preference. In fact, there were none. I shall never understand how any competent and incorruptible health inspector can stand before a rotating bollard of animal matter, days old and defiantly unrefrigerated, without calling forth the proprietor and wordlessly executing him on the spot.

  The pizza box I took possession of was almost too hot to hold. It was still impressively warm by the time I’d driven over the Tees, and right round Billingham to a lay-by beneath a gigantic overhead pipeline, broad as a Tube tunnel. I switched off the engine and heard a resonant gurgle from above; presently a complicated and very unhealthy smell eased in through Craig’s air vents.

  It’s years since ICI sold off most of Billingham to other chemical firms, and I’d been told that the complex was now a shadow of its former self. Some shadow. For more than twenty minutes I’d skirted its perimeter, silently agog at the gleaming, steaming alien structures, with their silvery entrails and spires of flame, their gigantic metal spheres that gasped and wheezed with whatever terrible process they were striving to encourage or restrain. It was at once both exhilarating and dreadful, and I could very easily understand why Aldous Huxley felt inspired to write his creepily dystopian classic Brave New World after a tour around Billingham. It’s also said to have provided Ridley Scott, raised in Teesside, with the visual template for Bladerunner.

  That smell was rather a leveller, though, like Darth Vader towering above you with his light sabre poised for the coup de grâce, and then doing a blow-off. There’s something just so stubbornly prosaic about bad odours. Scent is claimed to be the most evocative of the senses, but the most apocalyptic memory my nose could summon as I drove around Billingham was of youthful afternoons spent in the back garden, holding a stick crowned with a gently blazing carrier bag, raining fiery balls of molten plastic death upon a huddled platoon of 1/76 scale infantrymen.

  And sadly for Middlesbrough, Billingham and Wilton have made the town synonymous not with a fearsome, futuristic grandeur, but with smelling awful. Teessiders are known across the north-east as Smoggies. The Location, Slow-Motion, Damnation survey laid heavy emphasis on Middlesbrough’s abysmal air quality when justifying its verdict. In the medical journals, the region is identified as the UK’s asthma black spot; on the football terraces, Boro fans are greeted with taunts of ‘What’s it like to smell fresh air?’

  What indeed. I opened the pizza box a crack and was hit by a curdled waft that precisely replicated the challenging under-sock aroma described by the old man in the park. In haste I clamped it shut and wound down the window, welcoming in a roaring hiss and a chilled wave of pickled swamp gas. By judicious tinkering I established that a half-inch gap allowed the two stenches to cancel each other out. Then I eased the lid right back and there, prone on its nest of chips in the moody shadows of Craig’s interior half-light, sat a flaccid, glistening dumbbell weight.

  Underscoring the insidious dangers of long-term exposure to airborne toxins, those who work at Billingham or live near it must cope with the more tangible fear of being abruptly blown to pieces. The plant was opened in 1917 to synthesise ammonia-based artillery explosives, and is today the UK’s largest producer of ammonium nitrate, a fertiliser whose fearsome combustibility has attracted the attention of many a terrorist, and whose manufacture and storage are fraught with hazards. The industry’s most dumbfounding catastrophe occurred in 1947, when a ship full of ammonium nitrate caught fire and exploded on the quayside at Texas City, just south of Houston: 481 people were killed, including passengers in two passing aeroplanes whose wings were ripped off by the blast. The ship’s two-ton anchor turned up, still too hot to touch, in a field over a mile and a half away. That shattering disaster led to a radical tightening in precautionary regulations, but ongoing demand for what remains the world’s most ubiquitous fertiliser means vast and lethal bangs are never more than a discarded fag away: in the first decade of this century alone, related mishaps claimed five thousand casualties. In suffering no explosive deaths in recent years Billingham can count itself fortunate, though that’s probably not a word you’d want to suggest to veterans of the many ammonium-nitrate-based excitements the plant has hosted. A former instrument technician at Billingham recalled a 1960s blast of such harrowing intensity that three shell-shocked colleagues resigned on the spot. In 2006, nearby residents were flung from their beds by an explosion that ‘turned the whole world orange’, and was heard over 20 miles away.

  My stinking lapful of ladies’ parmo was beginning to look like an encapsulation of Middlesbrough’s every deficiency. At this stage it wouldn’t have been a huge surprise if it had blown up in my face. But I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and felt sure that a parmo’s bark (smell and appearance) could not possibly be as bad as its bite (taste). I grasped the warm and yielding roundel; it pro
mptly divided into soggy cubes, like a partly diced mango half. Then with a snatch and a snap of the jaws, my parmo virginity was sacrificed.

  Sensations were instantly unleashed that seemed distant from anything Nicos Harris could ever have intended. Gone were the breadcrumbs; more significantly, gone, too, was the escalope. At the core of my mouthful sat a loose layer of puréed fowl. Outside that, a fat sheathing of oiled sponge, and outside that, a crusted ooze pairing the odour of century-old Dairylea with the flavour of exhumed whey solids. It was like a spam fritter left outside for a year in a land where it rained fondue.

  I think we have now established that I will eat almost anything. I could not eat this. Another and much smaller bite confirmed the terrible evidence of the first. Even the chips, contaminated by leachate from what I would some months later hear a TV chef describe as ‘the antichrist of cooking’, proved beyond me. I tossed the box wanly into the footwell and drove away. Only then did I take note of the hour, and what it implied for my short-term accommodation plans. There was only one solution, and in a state of malnourished resignation I accepted it with no more than a slight lowering of the shoulders.

  ‘Hello again! Listen, we’re a bit full tonight. Would a view of the flyover be OK?’

  Chapter Six

  IT WAS A shudderingly bitter morning, hazed with Billingham smog, and I walked stiffly out into it, still harrowed and damp from my ordeal in the Metro Inn’s communal cleansing pod. Every Formule 1 shower comes decorated with an ankle-high frieze of van-driver pubes, marking the tide-line limit of the self-cleaning jets that dribble into action when you vacate the pod. Your bathing pleasure is compromised by the certain knowledge that gingery strays are plaiting themselves into your leg-hair, though only until you step into the drying zone, where they’re blasted free by a million-watt jet of hot air. Not so at the Metro Inn, where I writhed pitifully before a frail and frigid wisp, like a Death Eater’s final breath.

  Craig sat frost-rimed and alone in the mist-wreathed car park, looking as if he’d frozen to death in the night. So indeed he had. The choke knob proved immovably glaciated, resisting my efforts to free it so doughtily that before long I had worn right through the tips of two glove fingers. Undeterred by the hard-lacquered remains of a lady’s parmo in the footwell, despair and its foul-mouthed minions soon made themselves at home in Craig’s Arctic interior. I gave the key a twist, thereby filling the world with hypothermic mechanical toiling topped with a squawked request to take my order. So began the parping litany of burger, fried chicken and pizza establishments that is ‘The Fast Food Song’, the queasily, cheesily appropriate E. coli of novelty hit singles.

  In my twin capacities as tightwad and idiot, I spent an awful lot of my young adulthood on the hard shoulder, unscrewing the wrong bits of some stricken jalopy. It was a bitter-sweet moment when, at the age of twenty-seven, I opened the bonnet of my new (old) acquisition – a Citroën – and saw the entire engine hidden beneath a big cowl with DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT, SONNY stamped on the top in seven languages. The age of clueless fumbling was at an end: my relationship with the motor vehicle would henceforth be agreeably more distant than the needy, dysfunctional, love-hate folie à deux it had become. I haven’t bought a Haynes manual for two decades, let alone quickly reduced one to an oil-smeared, bloodstained and – don’t ask – flaming mess.

  The remedial skills currently at my disposal may be encapsulated in one simple maxim: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – but if it is, spray WD40 all over the bastard and give it another go. Get some under your fingernails and wave a socket wrench about and it even looks as if you know what you’re doing. It’s amazing how often this technique pays dividends: I strongly suspect you could employ it to good effect on head lice and sore throats. At any rate, it was with some relief that I now remembered the huge can of WD40 stowed in the boot, and indeed the scraper and de-icer acquired in a pound shop the day before and stowed alongside it.

  But the boot lock was stubborn at the best of times, and this certainly wasn’t one of those. I depressed the chrome knob and it stayed depressed, deep-frozen and obdurate. Nothing was going to coax it back out, though that didn’t stop me pushing through my right glove’s final fingers while trying. Could a man hate a silver button? I gave it my best shot. I sank to my haunches and stared at it coldly from point-blank range, then spattered its stupid little face with the fruits of a long and furious raspberry. That felt good; I inhaled deeply and did it again. I was drawing breath for a third when I saw I was being observed through the driver’s window of a lorry parked outside.

  Something had happened to Craig’s insides when I got back in behind the wheel. Something bad: loud, hot rage had fast-tracked the parmo-defrosting process, releasing a retch-friendly stench that I correctly guessed would haunt the interior for many days to come. Even with the parmo snatched up and by some irresistible reflex hurled into a hedge – sorry, Stockton on Tees – the sour and sickly smell hung heavy, so thick you could almost see it, like the wavy lines above a cartoon Camembert. I wound down all four windows and sat there for a while, letting the faintly acrid smog creep in and ‘The Fast Food Song’ creep out. McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut. Then I turned the key again and again and again, hearing Craig fire and die, fire and die. Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken. And with the starter wheezing into its death rattle, fire – and hold. Gunning the engine crazily and thickening the mist with great billows of uncatalysed fumes, I peered hopefully through the crystallised windscreen haze and pointed the Parmobile north.

  It is better to travel than to arrive, said someone who’d never gone very far in an Austin Maestro. The driver’s seat had begun to fall in on itself, sucking my trunk ever deeper into the wire eggbox of its fundament. The steering made roundabouts a decent aerobic workout and parallel parking an iron-man triathlon, even with the front tyres so recklessly over-inflated they pinged when I flicked them. Bulgarian peasant-spec suspension meant that speed bumps and potholes weren’t so much absorbed as battered into submission. Craig cornered on rails – rails made of warm licorice.

  The whole car had a sort of Tesco Value feel to it: it just about did the job, but felt like it wouldn’t for long. Shutting the door made a sound like kicking an empty Coke can, and more often than not caused the glovebox door to flop open. Closer inspection of the sat-nav screen’s data revealed that my true rate of progress was hugely slower than that indicated by Craig’s speedo, which read 70mph when I was actually doing 58. In their press releases, Austin Rover had made great play of the Maestro’s ‘homofocal’ headlights – an apparently innovative super-bright design burdened, like the vehicle they fronted, with an extremely silly name. Maybe he had suffered electrical complications during a difficult two-stage birth, but I have to say Craig’s homofocals were a useless liability. Heading through the Teesside fog I might as well have had a couple of IKEA tealights resting on the front bumper. Though it wasn’t all bad, as I was thus spared the finer detail of the terrible urban wasteland we presently broached.

  An also-ran in the Location chart at number twenty, Hartlepool didn’t make the cut on my initial itinerary. Belated persuasion came via the dark insinuations of ‘Hartlepool mind-games’ overheard in the Middlesbrough curry house, and – read over an Asda Value breakfast – a newspaper profile of Peter Mandelson, for many years the town’s MP. This reacquainted me with a notorious local tale: that of the ship’s monkey, sole survivor of a Napoleonic warship wrecked off the Hartlepool coast, lynched on the foreshore by hysterical townspeople who took him for a Frenchman. What I found interesting about this shameful episode is that it never happened: there was no shipwreck, no monkey, no hanging. Even more interesting is how the townspeople went on to embrace this fictional humiliation as their defining symbol. In 2001, Hartlepool FC introduced a man in a monkey suit as their official mascot. H’angus, as he was known, quickly distinguished himself at away games by simulating sexual intercourse with match stewards, an activity for which he was
regularly ejected by police. Undeterred by this CV, and a range of policies that began and ended with ‘free bananas for schoolkids’, a year later the people of Hartlepool elected him as their mayor. H’angus has since been re-elected twice – the first mayor in the country ever to be voted in for a third term. Perhaps it was their way of making up for electing Peter Mandelson three times, without lynching him on the foreshore even once. Or perhaps it was because they had simply gone past caring.

  There were two questions I could be sure my friends and family would be asking when I visited them after returning home. The first: ‘Sorry, but would you mind parking that round the corner?’ The second: ‘So, what was the worst place, then?’ I drove through Hartlepool with my features set somewhere between confusion and disbelief, like George Bush being told about the twin towers, just as he was really getting into that story about the goat. I had an answer.

  The drilled-metal grille, as welded over the doors and windows of long-abandoned buildings, was no stranger to me these days. But in Hartlepool, it had become the civic leitmotif, the must-have structural accessory. Entire misty streets, entire misty districts, bore this mark of the damned: Victorian back-to-backs, red-brick inter-war estates, Sixties mini-Bransholmes. The whole town had been earmarked for destruction, but the programme appeared to have been cancelled halfway through. There can be few sights more poignant, more disrespectful and intrusive, than a crudely bisected family home: a bathroom mirror gleaming out above the clinging shards of a pink-tiled splashback, an exposed bedroom wall still graced with a carefully hand-painted depiction of the Hartlepool FC crest.