by J.W. Carey
With a character at once a stranger, an intruder into their idyllic lifestyle (one reminiscent of some Irvine Walsh fantasy) and yet as well known to them both as the child which gently thrashes itself to life amongst the neatly folded shirts in the open cupboard drawer hidden in the corner of their room, it pushes itself to its feet. She flinches as the hand grabs at her, pulling her into the clean smoke and the foul stench of the monster’s poisoned breath.
It takes another swig, and the fist moves through the air in one long, drawn out scene, all black and white stop-motion imagery, with the contrast turned up too high and the Instagram filters shifting with every third shot. It roars like a hyena, part sorrow, part laughter and part evolutionary desire, and she slumps to the floor in silence. The baby starts to cry, as it always does. She crawls across the stained carpet, rich with the stench of her own impotent efforts, her head carefully held below the smoke expelled from the beast’s nostrils in huge gouts, absent of the flames they deserved.
There would be no apology for her tomorrow, no embarrassed, plastic roses in a nervous hand or some pitiful explanation to their mutual friends, with regards to the dangers of staircases or the aggressive nature of doors.
It was that contribution, that concoction of testosterone, something approaching adrenalin and a sense of disgust not as great as I wish it were, which added the brief, flashing dream of sobriety to the smelting pot of my consciousness. That dream was ignorant of the rain lashing down around our rattling cage, which stank of my vomit and the human refuse amongst whom I had cowered for the last hour.
Despite what little poison was left swirling in my stomach, it was the sight of that disinterested woman, with no expression on her face and a mark on her arm, pretending that I had made her day, her very existence, one measurable iota worse, which made me wince my way into relative control of my body. The self-loathing was, as a tool to awaken myself from the stupor of the drunkard, more effective than any Starbucks coffee, any over-the-counter medication or late-night, dramatised back-alley deal. I stared at her for a few moments more, feeling expression return to my decreasingly numbed features, feeling each strained breath in a body ill-designed for the life I bullied it through. I am certain my dull gaze, full of misdirected anger, made her uncomfortable; she must have felt it like a doe feels the coming of the storm, or the fire which eats at the forest after it has made its desperate escape. There was rage on that rattling, stinking vehicle, and it was a rage in which I, the recluse, gloried.
* * *
How is it going so far? Can you understand what I am trying to say, what I am trying to do? To lead you by one of these clammy, cold hands into a world of failed Romanticism, into an existence filled with the echoes of industries, dead or dying, and the ghosts of stronger, simpler men? To show you the undesired Heaven that I, or this caricature whom I would present to you as truth, was raised in, moulded by?
Can you imagine it to be different? A place where the gritty world of the North, the once industrial capital of our supposedly ‘Sceptred Isle’, lacks the things that made it so, all sold out to the gods of Health and Safety, of an equality only enforced when it is suitable, and nowhere else? An existence where a self-proclaimed ‘Northern Playwright’, that character whom, in their pride and their arrogance would dare to think of themselves as the ‘Natural Genius’, cares more for the reviews of the solitary? Yet somehow failing to realise that the stoically silent crowd is the critic? When they take the ghosts of better men, of Baum and Dickens, the heritage left behind by those whom would call themselves artists, and plagiarise them with a careful eye and a shaking hand.
Can you not see them, checking over their shoulder to make certain their infantile doubts remain undiscovered? When they sup at their white wine in the sun, and their mulled variation in the increasingly deniable bitter chill of winter, congratulating each other on their publicly lauded and yet, wholly imagined, successes?
* * *
The look the driver gave me as I muttered ‘Cheers mate’ and lurched gracefully off of the bus’ bottom step, could only be described as pissed off.
I could hardly blame the man.
As the hiss of air announced the doors closing jerkily behind me, I stretched my back, feeling my slightly-oversized coat shift across my shoulders, sending a chilling breath of air sweeping into the back of my collar. In a battle which would have been noted as one of the greatest wars of history, it met the warmth escaping my flesh halfway down my spine. They swirled together; each one curling their writhing tendrils around the other’s gasping form.
In the aftermath of that great conflict, I shivered, and stepped under the relative shelter of the bus-stop. It was one of those that appeared half-built, with half of said half corroding faster than lead piping by the sea, than teeth in a fat child’s face or those lodged in some methamphetamine addict’s slack maw, offering protection from the direction of the slice of grey that signified freedom, from the army of paratroopers dropping from the bruised sky, and little else. The timetable, one which would normally offer such invaluable information as ’5, 27, 43 past every hour until 18:00’, or the names of places which, in my imbecility, appeared to be torn straight out of some Grimm Fairytale or child’s fable, whether it be Hag Fold, Daisy Hill or Cedar Grove.
Unfortunately, thanks to the whims of whatever being who so dares to call itself God, whom dares to operate in the cold, grey North (or the lack thereof), the plastic panel hung open and empty. No, empty is not the right word. It was filled with other information, much of which I have little doubt is normally privy to only the select few Scientologists, those who pay inordinate amounts of soft-earned wealth to have the secrets of the universe revealed to them. Information, in a mixture of red, streaked marker or carved into the greyish, purpling plastic, such as ‘Gernie is krap’, ‘i luv it up the bum’ (followed by a picture, of a character I assumed to be said poetic genius, taking what looked like an out-of-scale drawing of the Challenger straight between a pair of bulbous arse-cheeks), and an out of place heart, offering the complex romance, with echoes of the greatest Shakespearean Art and the tragedy of the last days of Troy, gathered together by some genius’ knife and hewn into the machine-made tapestry to form, ‘Gazzz + Ur Maaaa 4ever’.
Right. So I was definitely somewhere between Manchester and Liverpool, lost in the depths of that suburban sprawl of dull green and exciting grey. That mess of invention which marks the presence of those rapidly de-evolving creatures that I would no doubt feel obliged, albeit with a twinge of guilt, to offer the description of humanity to. That was okay, I remember thinking naively; I can deal with that. As I began to dig in my pocket for my phone, the thought which marched smartly to the forefront of my brain calmly informed me that I should ‘ascertain as to the present location of my physical form’, rather than incoherently babbling ‘somewhere between Liverpool and Manchester’, to any taxi or other form of transport I might manage to board.
The rain seemed to slacken, as though it approved of the incompetence in my logic, the marching host above me shrinking into the remnants of some great defeat, each light rap the tramp of a deserter’s dishevelled boot in the mud. I stood perfectly still for the briefest of moments, enjoying the first glimmerings of sobriety in the chill air, the faint spit of the rain as it clapped against the pavement around me, passing me by, leaving me untouched and unsoiled in the darkened evening of a place I knew not. I smiled a genuine grin, despite how pained I imagine that expression must have appeared stretched across my lips, had there been another soul brave enough to venture out into that torrid night. I stepped out into the tears of a non-existent God and, for the first time in hours, perhaps days, I felt good. I felt alive. I opened my mouth, the words of a prayer that I had no belief in, to a being that didn’t exist, hanging off my pregnant tongue like stalactites in some hidden cavern, water-logged and dark.
So I threw up again.
* * *
I remembered the heat, the breath clasped tightly in white
-knuckled fists, as though its possessor was unwilling to let that one gasp of cold air, which grew warmer and warmer between her sweating fingers, into the relative rattling, ponderous bullet within which they waited. They waited, their thoughts already on the possibility of existence at the end of this short captivity, with eyes darting from blank space to blank space, neither sharing the same patch of tepid air, despite the obvious fact that they have been surviving, I would certainly not categorise what these ‘people’ do as ‘living’, on each other’s breath for the better part of an hour already. In a mixture of rattling rails, hushed phone calls and the all too common huffs of irritated air, we made our stately way towards the old Town, a place devoid of personality and filled with the ghosts of the idealistic purveyors of consumerism.
I didn’t want the journey to end; no more than Odysseus; in his deepest, darkest thoughts, those that twisted like coiling serpents in the dead of those ancient oceanic nights, desired his own pathway to cease. I didn’t want it to end; no more than Alighieri, on his tenuous pilgrimage through the gates of Hell, through the hanging threat of Purgatory, wanted his worn feet to finally reach the foot of St. Peter’s watchful workstation. That is one of the few memories which has stuck with me and has replicated itself. I close my eyes, and shallowly breathe in the stink of the pensive, worrying mass, and I tighten my lips around the thought. I feel (as rare an occurrence as that is) the world move below me and despite my knowledge that, in truth, I am moving above it, I feel peaceful.
The sounds are blotted out, reaching me warped and dazed around the headphones I have buried deep into my mind, as someone infinitely greater than I, greater than the thinly veiled parodies of personality crowded around me, journeys with me to a place they will never reach. They question me, and I have no answer for them, as they shallowly reply to my queries, to the warped logic cowering behind my own brow.
I close my eyes and tighten my jaw, an attempted compensation for the incredible, man-made overbite which plagues me, though I know the expression it forces onto my face. A misery, a failed contempt hangs in the air before me, kicking out in disbelief at its own mortality, its own realised intangibility. In my ears, a man who does not even know his own name, a man so warped by the years and the song and the dance that every word carries the weight of gold and yet remains half as comprehensible, replies to the questions of his companions with a self-referential epiphany of his own.
What other kind of epiphany is there?
Bob Dylan
The night, no doubt weary with my idiocy and despite what I am sure was an intense search into the depths of its unknowable heart had clearly run out of any remnant of its previously piteous nature. It opened its eyes in some grotesque parody of myself or, perhaps it would bear more honesty to say the reverse, lest that former offer some insight into the deep-seated arrogance which forms a part of even the most humble drunkard’s personality.
I pushed the panel shut. Leaning against it, my shoulders dug into the plastic frame. My lungs shuddered and my eyes, caught halfway to shame, filled with tears. The aftermath was always worse, when the recovery and the fire in the throat struggled, each warring for dominance in the cold dark. The plastic felt warm against my skull, a contrast with the chill air lapping at my face, as though my paled flesh were the white sanded shore of some ancient Mesopotamian isle.
I tilted my face to the sky, the rain rattling on the assumed Perspex roof of my tentative shelter. I remember a sense of disillusionment, a sense of... guilt, that I had some shelter from the weak ravages of nature, whilst the world around me was washed clean. As the thought struck me, I struggled to focus my eyes on the black streak which, still, marked my emergence onto the street. It had thinned beneath the pressure of its peers, fellow liquid biting into the bleak colour, spreading it across the paving, seeping into the cracked stone as though it were the rushing regurgitation of the Red Sea, filling in that holy, murderous valley.
Behind me, ripping their way through the spray, sets of headlights too-bright, of blinking taillights like the eyes of politicians, of dull faces as featureless ovals, overjoyed that they possess a shelter superior to my own tore along the road, with less freedom than I possessed, despite what Springsteen and his spiritual successors would have the world believe. They made their ponderous way across deliberately uneven ground, the lies of freedom emerging from every stereo, from every twisted knob, worn away by the monotony of the same station, by the sheer unpredictability of the same choices, the same ignorant acceptance of the obvious truths, by Einstein’s clichéd definition of insanity.
I watched them for a while, my eyes flickering from vehicle to vehicle, searching for some example of assumed freedom, for some notion of originality amidst the monotony of high-speed persuasion, for truth, however maligned, however unreliable the source. The rain slackened and resumed whilst I stared out, answering questions no one but I had asked, and no one but I would ever ask. I thought of Rorschach and Manhattan and the definition of villainy, of Motorhead and money and sex, the overwhelming desire to be ‘cool’ and the sounds of distant ships docking, of the violent grass floating on an ever more aggressive wind and the breath of the trees in the depths of night, and how each had sent inspiration hurtling out in the stratosphere of collective creativity. I thought of everything and I thought of nothing and the similarities between the two, whilst my pupils continued to twist, to writhe and dart within the hazily-defined parameters of my skull.
* * *
There was a chill in the air that night, an indication, if any was needed, that none of my actions for the last several hours had been ones I would repeat if only the collected coherence of my thoughts would resurrect itself from a self-inflicted semi-stupor. My body, my physical shell and little more, was in a bad way. Exhaustion and misery warred together for dominance. Looking back, pain should have entered into that same grudge match, but the air was so bitter and my mind was all but numb, and so the agony I expected must have simply washed over me, tepid bathwater over some sudden and undesired, unattended erection.
* * *
The room isn’t silent, it isn’t possible with even such a number of people, but it is closer to it than any gathering I had heard before. The old men, bent forward over the bar, didn’t appear to hear the floor creak as I stepped through it. In an ideal world, the door would have been a pair, and both would have swung open, dragging in the refuse of the weather I had summarily abandoned. The cold air would have rushed around the room, announcing my arrival even before I said a word. I would have paused for a moment, savouring the air, the relative warmth seeping into my unfeeling bones. I would have strolled straight to the bar, and ordered a whiskey. Something straight, something Eastwood would have sipped at, his enemies drawing in around him before, with a tip of his hat and a flicker of his poncho, he leaves the undertaker more business than he could otherwise have dreamt of, a little piece of economic stimulus in consistently hard times.
Unfortunately, due to some selfish architect, the door was single and, due to the incompetence of the owners, already open. The fake yellow light spilled out into the rain, the little influence it enjoyed extending no more than a foot before it failed against the night. The jukebox was hidden away in the corner as though the place was ashamed of it, ashamed of the very idea of variation it suggested.
My first mistake, approaching me as quickly as the enquiring gaze of the bartender, like the watch-light of some prison complex scanning for an escapee, was acting as though I was sober. I walked too straight, too carefully; too concerned with keeping my head down, too worried about the eyes I could feel on me, so I just walked. That journey seemed eternal. I walked, and I walked and I walked, straight into a group of young ‘men’, crowded around their half-finished drinks, their first round of the night.
They were young, certainly no older than me. Their hair was either cropped short, making them look like they were recently recovering from some kind of aggressive chemotherapy, or what they no doubt thought of
as ‘long’ albeit gelled up, into some spiked mess more reminiscent of Sonic the Hedgehog than whichever footballer they were no doubt attempting to replicate. They wore the same shirts, Calvin Klein or some such, well made and fitted, but to a shape that clearly was not their own. Oh, they had rolled up the sleeves, to display their muscles and tribal tattoos, like peacocks fluffing out their plumage, to disguise the ill-fitting, semi-expensive material.
I could give you a detailed description of each, their faces ingrained into my memory, but, in actuality, they all looked the same. The same incredulous expression across the same features, chiselled in the way that a pigeon’s shit is a rainbow of colour one would choose to decorate their child’s nursery. They stank of cheap aftershave, evidently labouring under the belief that buying one relatively expensive shirt instantly made them undeniably appealing to women. They looked skeletal, despite the protein shake stains I could all but see on their lips, despite the regular trips to the gym I could see burnt across their forearms. They were the image of a lower-middle class youth, though possessing much greater aspirations, engaged in that most sacred of activities. They were ‘on the pull’. Unsurprisingly, it hadn’t entered their mind to go somewhere with an audience for their self-congratulatory attraction.
So, it wasn’t much of a surprise when they crowded around me, each one attempting to loom over me, despite the fact that I had a good few awkward inches on them. Rather than threatening, it became almost homoerotic, a crowd of fake-tanned men in faux-formal wear, the culmination of which resembled something closer to the warm afternoon of a Clay Aiken concert, than some generically branded, foul-smelling pub in the North of England.
