by R. D Rhodes
I kept looking in at the windows of the rooms that weren’t boarded. Here and there a curtain twitched or a hollow face stared back at me. I passed by a porch where a middle-aged man stood dragging on a cigarette. He kept watching me through sunken eyes as I walked down the street.
But the people were few. Most of the flats were empty. But there’s a “HOUSING SHORTAGE CRISIS!” said the media. There didn’t look like a lack of housing to me.
I was walking to escape myself, escape my own thoughts. I kept going at a fast pace, not knowing where, I just had to keep on walking. I needed to see all this, I had to see it all. It was like a secret underworld hell on earth. Why was this not in the papers or the news, why were they concentrating on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and hunger in Africa when there was poverty right here?
I worried myself, it couldn’t be a good thing to hate the human race, my fellow species, as much as I did. But I couldn’t not hate them, look what they were doing.
I thought the endless maze of houses would never end but suddenly they broke off and a busy road came into view. Cars raced franticly by on all sides. I stepped to the corner and tried to figure out which way to go to get back to the house, but all the streets looked identical. I gazed up and down the road and at the cluttered skyline for the familiar three high-rise flats, but I couldn’t see them anywhere. The chaotic outpours of cars kept shooting past and smothering the air with their screams. I turned back around and picked a street that looked familiar. I couldn’t even bare to look up, I thought I might be sick or have a fit, so I fixed my eyes on the pavement and marched straight ahead. Then in my periphery, I spotted a man. I glanced up as he kept coming, storming straight for me, staring at me through eyes burning with hatred. I crossed the road and sped up and he walked on by. I walked fast. I started to jog to make up time. I jogged back past a teenager dressed in a full blue tracksuit, who picked up a stone and hurled it at one of the steel boards. A little boy tagged behind him and watched as the stone ricocheted of the metal, then he picked up a stone himself and did the exact same thing. I heard the thud behind me as I picked up my pace. Kids were just like mirrors, they just copied everything they fuckin seen.
I jogged on and on until I arrived back at the flats. I sprinted up the stairs and burst in through the door.
Chapter 35
They both looked up from the couch.
“Where have you bee- you okay?” Harry looked alarmed.
“Yeah. I’m fine.” I tried to regain my breath. “Sorry. I got lost. Had to jog back.”
They both stood up at the same time, still looking at me, “We were worried,” Harry said, “you’ve been gone ages.”
“I’m fine, honestly,” I smiled, “You ready to go?”
His eyes lingered, then he turned to Gary and put out his hand. “Well, I suppose then, mate. Thanks again for everything man, really appreciate it.”
“Aye, no bother. Anytime, Harry.” Gary glanced at me. “Here, wait a minute,” he went into the coffee table drawer and pulled out an old portable CD player with a pair of earphones attached, “Ye guys want this? I don’t use it anymore?”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Aye, course. Here, take a couple of CDs as well.” I followed him through to his room, to the CD rack with over a hundred lined in rows.
“Take whatever you want. Em, apart from that one, and this one.”
“What about these?”
“Aye, no bother. You only want two?”
“Two’s more than enough. Thanks so much! I’ll give you your jacket.”
“Woah, woah, woah. You’ll need that. It’s cold just noo, and ah have plenty anyway. No, honestly, keep it.”
I pulled the zip back up as he waved his hand away and turned back out the room.
“Come back anytime. Yous are always welcome.” He said at the door. We thanked him profusely and hugged him, said our goodbyes, and Harry and I made our way down the long flight of stairs and out into the street.
“Did you tell him where we’re going?” I said.
“No. He never asked.”
“Oh.”
“He gave us some money.”
“Did he? How much?”
Harry reached into the pouch pocket of the hoody Gary had given him. He had a full rucksack on his back now too. The guy had so little yet had given us so much.
“A hundred.” Harry confirmed. “Should be just about enough for everything we need.”
“What a guy.”
“Yeah. How was your walk?”
“It was alright.”
“Where did you go?”
“Just, ..around the block.” I kept my eyes on the pavement. I felt a little better, now that I was leaving it all behind. I felt a bit of guilt though. Why should I be fortunate enough to leave? I thought. But then again, they weren’t forced to live there. Weren’t held at gunpoint. They could get up today and leave if they really wanted to. Half of them probably didn’t know anything else though, didn’t know what else was out there.
We walked on at a decent pace, following the road for the bus station. It was still only nine-thirty and the streets hadn’t been fully cleaned up yet from the night before. Pavement pizzas of puke coloured the tarmac and full black waste bags were piled up high.
We got back on Sauchiehall Street. All the young clubbers had been replaced with middle-aged slobs out for their Saturday morning shop. They waddled along the pavements with their glaiket eyes, their chins wobbling and their slack trousers held up by their protruding stomachs.
We arrived at the station and waited at the stance. The bus pulled in and we joined the back of the line. As I stepped forward it took good footwork to avoid the many greeners gobbed in little puddles all over the ground.
We got our tickets and walked down the aisle. The bus was almost full. There was spare seats but some selfish bastards had put their rucksacks, handbags and newspapers down to ward off any unwanted neighbours. I stopped at one and asked a man with his face in The Daily Mail if I could sit there? He snuffed, looked me up and down, then reluctantly moved his bag.
Harry was somewhere further up. I sat down and took Nevermind and the CD player out of my bag and turned it on. I held the earphones at arms-length to see if anyone else could hear, they couldn’t, and I plugged them into my ears.
Minutes later the bus pulled out, passing the many faces at the stances, every fourth one portraying a fed-up, looking-for-a-fight, poverty-stricken look. I listened to Breed as bus after bus went by in the window and the bored conductors waved their arms.
The bus cut through the packed streets filled with the many wasted lives and dead souls and lost sheep, through the midst of that human traffic, and along the avenues of grey towers under the thin strips of grey sky. Builders in fluorescent-orange bobbed up and down the scaffolding on the buildings that were going up left, right and center as “THE ECONOMY WAS GROWING” and the government “WAS CREATING JOBS.”
God bless them, I thought. Their big wallets, pathetic little manifestos and one-dimensional visions. “Getting the economy growing,” for us, and “creating jobs.”
The earth was fucked. I could see it as clearly as I could see these cities expanding. Expanding because the world was run by something called an economy. This meant you made profit and lots of nice money. But to get this money you had to buy and sell things and those things all came from the earth. And God forbid an economy stops growing because that would mean a “recession” and recessions were “bad.” A recession meant that slaves don’t have jobs to go to and bosses to work for anymore, so the country stops getting rich and the rate of housing expansion slows down. You have to get trading and make lots of nice money, so you keep building houses and offices and coffee shops and all the other shit and once you’ve built them you just build some more, and the cities and towns expand and expand until one day the earth is a great big concrete ball. Without the earth we are dead, but fuck it, as long as politicians kept their five-year manifestos a
nd looked good at the end of their stay in parliament, as long as they have their wee happy statistics to say that they have done this and that, then it’s all good.
And people fucked, bred, multiplied and got more houses. And sometimes the houses they were in were simply too small for them. It was very important for a couple to have at least a three-bedroom house to store all their shit and to have “plenty space.” And the TV supported all this madness. House in the country. New life in the country. Location Location Location. Is your house too small?
This was what we were meant to be doing. It was all good.
And the masses didn’t have to think about anything because they were all having their brains killed in work, and from the media, so everything was hunkey dory.
And just as I was thinking that, as if by some psychic power, an animated conversation burst over my head from a few rows behind. They were so loud that I took my earphones out, almost in disbelief,
“Oh, Cherie,” a voice chirped, “I widnae ken what to do without ma work. Ah’d be bored stiff.”
“Och no, ah love it. I get everyhin pied for me and don’t have to do anything. Ah get up late, hae my breakfast and watch Jeremy Kyle in ma PJ’s.”
“Ye’ll get bored wae that eventually though. Ah’d be bored aifter twa days.”
Then a kid on the back row decided that everyone liked Rihanna, and turned his music up full blast. The bus rode the concrete hills, stopping and starting at the traffic lights and winding through Glasgow while she sang “C’MON RUDE BOY BOY CAN YOU GET IT UP? TAKE IT TAKE IT TAKE IT TAKE IT! LET ME LOVE YOU!” I thought how appropriate it was though, it would have been the perfect soundtrack for the night before as they all went out to procreate and rubbed crotches in each other’s faces like the apes we were.
I turned up the volume on my earphones but I couldn’t blot the racket out. Noise blurred from all angles. I pulled them out. People were bastards.
I glanced up. Through the gap between the chairs in front, I saw a gossip magazine spread in a pair of hands. I winced. Where was this evolution I kept hearing about? I had nothing to divert my concentration onto either; the buildings blocked the world from my window. All modern cities with their modern architecture were exactly the same, once you’d seen one, you’d seen them all.
At last we broke clear, and the bus swung round the M9’s bends, as the buildings were replaced by miles of desolate farmland, spruce tree plantations and wind turbines scarring the hills. We stopped at Perth. People got on. People got off. Then back on the M9. As we drew closer to Inverness the paranoia came in waves. I tried to be logical. Tried not to focus on the CCTV cameras above us. Nirvana was still blasting into my ears as we arrived in the newest city in Britain.
Chapter 36
I looked all around the station but couldn’t see any police. I followed the line of people off and met Harry outside.
“Arite?” His face was flushed and his black eyes were gleaming. His neck was hidden under his scarf, his hoody covering his shortened brown hair. He looked warm under the layers that puffed his upper body up.
“Your scabs are healing.” I observed. “Your lips too,” they had almost completely reverted to their full thinness, “I’m okay. How are you?”
“Good!” He turned his thin legs to walk down the street. “Nervous though. This is where I’m from. They might look here. I don’t want to spend too long, let’s just keep our heads low and get out quick. Actually, maybe you should keep behind me?”
I did what he asked and lingered a few yards behind, following his back. He was shaking a little as he crossed over onto the high street. A police car passed on the road, but was going fast, and when it went by Harry seemed to calm down again.
Crime rates are ten times lower here than Glasgow, I thought. That means more bored cops looking for something to do.
Harry led into a close then turned right again and we arrived at a camping store with a big “Half price on all items!” notice on the window. We headed in. We saw everything we needed, and they weren’t too expensive- sleeping bags, warm clothes, a pot and pan and a decent knife, a few other things. I couldn’t help checking out the window. Even the sales assistant was making me suspicious. She was watching us like a hawk.
We paid and left promptly. I followed Harry’s quick strides down one side street then up another, and into Lidl. We threw rice, jam, bread, peanuts, cheese and teabags into the basket and headed to the checkout then outside and paced back to the bus station. With two minutes to spare we caught the bus for Cannich, paid the rosy-cheeked driver, and went to the back row. I sat by the right window and Harry sat to the left. He was a bundle of energy and grinning from ear to ear. He clenched his hand and pumped it in the air, “Think we’ve done it, Aisha! We’re fine now!” He wrapped his arms around me and squeezed tightly. “Yeah! Think we’re okay! We’re okay!”
I let him hug me then pulled back out. I wasn’t convinced. I wanted to get there first. And what would we even do when we were there?
“What’s the matter?”
“Nuthin. I just want to get there, and get settled into the tent. I’ll feel better then. I kind of, feel…” I didn’t want to say.
His grin faded a little. His eyes narrowed. “What? The hospital? You’re worrying about the other patients?”
“Well, yeah and…yeah the hospital.” I lied. “And I’m tired. I just want to get there.” I was exhausted though, that was true. His supercharged state wasn’t picking me up either.
“Well, look, we can discuss the hospital later. And phone someone or something. But we’re free, I think. So, you can relax now. Go. Sleep!” His smile encouraged.
He scooted back to the left to peer out the other window, and I closed my eyes and tried to drift off. But sleep wouldn’t come. I opened them again to the main road. The bus crossed over a bridge. A police car went by the other way, but it disappeared out the back window.
Harry was crashed out. Burnt himself out probably. Drool ran from the corner of his mouth as his head rested against the other windowpane. We came to the shore of Loch Ness. Eventually, the tension in my head started to ebb away, and ten minutes later, on an empty, winding country road, as I looked forward in that mostly empty bus with only a few elderly passengers, I knew too, that we’d be safe.
I breathed a deep sigh of relief. The anxiety had drained me. The cities and the people had drained me. The chase and running had drained me. I felt foggy, and as the bus climbed the winding hill roads around Loch Ness, when I should have taken some comfort from the views, or hope at my prospective future freedom, instead I was attacked by another round of the blues. I felt myself sinking into it. All the adrenaline and anger had moved on, and left desolation behind to take over.
Harry snored softly. The bus drifted around the bends in the half-light, along the tree-lined glen, under the overcast sky. I closed my eyes again and tried for a while to get to sleep. But my head wouldn’t let up. If it wasn’t one thing it was another. From anxiety to fear, from sickness to depression. I just wanted to switch off.
I felt sad and alone and empty. I rested my cheek on the window and peered out at the misty hue of the saturated landscape. Rain began to fall and cling on persistently to the other side of the glass. The passengers were silent below its tip-tapping and the gentle rumble of the engine. I bent down, shuffled through my bag and took out the CD player. I pulled out Nirvana and clicked in Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind.
It was more than just an ordinary album to me. From when I discovered it at twelve, just after it all started going wrong, those songs enabled me to drag myself through life. And I wanted them, needed them, to drag me through again now.
There were words of truth in there, profound truths that floated back from time to time to haunt my mind, especially in times like this when I was really low and the images ate at me. When I heard that strained, weary, death-like voice slowly crackling in my ears going “well my sense of humanity… has gone down the drain…. behind every b
eautiful thing… there’s been some kind of pain,” it zapped my nerves like a jolt of electric and seemed to soothe the burned-out wires.
I thought I could listen to those tracks for eternity. My suffering became somehow more meaningful, more mystical and more bearable as I listened to him over the sad violin and distorted instruments. Here he was saying that life was suffering. And he was bored of it all. Everything was so tedious and messed up. Every poor human dragging their bodies along in jangling chains, with nowhere to go and no reason why.
I wasn’t looking forward to hiding out like a fugitive. And that’s what I was now, for God knows how long. At the beginning of winter too. December was right around the corner.
But that wasn’t why I was feeling so low. Or maybe it was, but it wasn’t just that. I just had to look outside and know what I was seeing. See what man had done and was doing to everything. I worried. I kept trying to block out the images of Dad and Nina and Sandy and Megan because there was nothing I could do. Was Dad okay? Was he in some other world and was he now suffering for what he had did? Was Nina alive? Had she broken her legs and got caught? Or had she died in the fall, or had she escaped? Would she be able to put those rapes behind her, and learn to trust people again, and to look at life with optimism? How would Sandy be, with all his hallucinations? And what if things had gotten worse at the hospital because Harry and I had ran away? What would happen to everyone else? To the little girl on the housing estate that got screamed at by her mum? To the little boy that copied his brother throwing a brick at the metal-barred windows? What would those kids grow up to become? What sort of world would they grow up into?
