by Gary McMahon
But the girl didn’t arrive for their second date, and he got drunk all over again, necking pint after pint of two-for-one Stella from dirty glasses while loud dance music blared like the soundtrack from a nightmare around him. Some time after ten o’clock, he staggered to the gent’s, his guts aching and his head feeling like someone had smashed a chair over it. After vomiting in the toilet, he sat down and lit up a cigarette, fighting the nausea that still raged within him.
That was when he saw it. Amid the vulgar graffiti, the thickly scrawled telephone numbers and promises of deep-throat blowjobs, the dirty jokes and the casual abuse of people he would never know, those five words shone out at him as if they were written in light.
Faded red ink on the back of a battered wooden door. The words had called to him in a way that he couldn’t even begin to understand. So he memorised them and stumbled outside to find a taxi home.
The next day Pierce awoke to find those words scrawled on the wall above his head in thick black marker. He’d obviously written them when he’d returned home, drunk and angry and needing something that he could never define. There was an empty vodka bottle on the floor by the door, and the intense pain in his head told him where the contents had gone. The note from Sandra was there, too; lying next to the bottle, heavily creased from where it had been balled-up and smoothed out time and time again. He knew what was written there by heart, and memory didn’t make the message any less harsh:
I’ll be back in a week, and then we’ll talk.
If you have any love left for me in your heart, you’ll be here waiting.
If you’re gone, I’ll take it as goodbye.
After all, there’s always something in the way, isn’t there?
Sand. x
He’d read that note a hundred times; left a hundred times more, then come crawling back through the door filled with drink and self-loathing and regret. He thought that he still loved her, but it was difficult to tell for sure. Their marriage had become like habit; something that they both went through without thinking, and whose impact barely even registered anymore. The lust and abandon of the past had changed to routine and over-familiarity.
Yet still…still, he knew that there must be a spark of passion hidden deep within them both. Otherwise, one of them would have called it quits a long time ago. Fifteen years was a damned long time, and you couldn’t write it off that easily. There must be something left to salvage, but it would take a lot of digging to pull it kicking and screaming back up into the light. It was always the same, whenever they were together. However hard they tried to get through the damage, there was just something in the way.
Later that day he bought the notepad and the red pen. Over a liquid lunch in a pub filled with hungry strangers he copied down those words from memory: Something in the way?
Writing them down had seemed the most natural thing in the world at the time, but now, thinking back, his motivation was unclear. Perhaps he had sensed some latent power in them, a talismanic force he was willing to follow wherever it may lead. Lying on his narrow bed in that cheap room, he thought that he must have known the words were the first point on a map of the mind; a co-ordinate point, after which many more would follow. Where that map would take him was still unclear, but he was still willing to track the route. And he knew that his life might change forever by doing so.
It was three days later when things took a turn for the bizarre. Sandra still wasn’t back, even though her note had promised a brief sojourn. They’d spoken on the phone, but their conversations had been stilted, unsatisfying. Amounting to nothing more than the vocal equivalent of walking on eggshells. She promised that she’d return soon, and that they’d talk, but didn’t say when. If he was honest, Pierce was losing interest, the gap in himself widening each day to consume his emotions and leave him feeling empty and washed-out. If Sandra was coming back, she’d better be quick; if she left it too long, he would no longer be there to greet her when she walked through the door.
He was drunk again, and staggering home after being ejected from a nightclub a few miles from his house. Passing a public call box, he decided to ring a taxi. The night was cool, and he was wearing a thin shirt; he’d lost his coat in the club, when he was chasing some girl onto the dance floor.
He fell into the phone box, wincing as his shoulder struck the slowly closing door. The receiver fell from its mounting when his groping hands reached for it, plastic clattering against metal in the narrow space. He groped around in the dark, trying to grasp the handset, but his fingers were clumsy with alcohol. Then, as a car passed on the road, its headlights illuminating his awkward display, he saw the words written in red ink on a sticker that was pasted to one of the small square windows. It was the same handwriting, he knew it: a sloping, almost artistic hand with stylised little curlicues above the letter “a”. The words were different this time, but just as resonant:
Talk to us and discover what’s in the way: 08008675982.
Pierce could barely believe his eyes. The telephone number after the words was like a kiss in the dark from a stranger: frightening, yet exhilarating in a way that made him feel sick in the pit of his stomach. He knew that he would copy down the message even before he was reaching into his jeans back pocket for the notebook and pen. He’d begun to carry them with him wherever he went, in the unconscious hope that something like this would happen. His hands were suddenly steady as he jotted down the words and telephone number. He glanced nervously at the phone, but knew that he could not ring the number tonight. Not here, in this badly lit street somewhere south of nowhere. No, he would ring the number from the safety and comfort of his own home, where he could feel at least partially in control.
III
Two am in the morning, and Pierce sat in his living room, the telephone perched on the coffee table before him. He had been staring at the number on the pad for over an hour, and only now felt ready to dial. He picked up the receiver and punched the numbers into the keypad. The ringtone took so long to sound in his ears that he thought the connection would not be made, or that the number was a fiction. Then the ringing began, sounding muted by distance. After ten rings, he was ready to hang up. His hand tensed as he began to take the receiver from his ear, then there was a sharp clattering noise as someone clumsily picked up on the other end of the line.
“Hello.” The cultured male voice he heard was tired, slightly slurred, as if the speaker had just woken from a deep sleep - as he probably had.
“Hi. I…erm…I found your number.”
“In a telephone box somewhere in the city? Or on a toilet wall in some shithole boozer along a pissy back street? Or maybe scrawled on a demolished building on some derelict industrial park?
“All the lonely places.
“I know, my friend. I know. You found the number and just had to call. Something in the words that were with it spoke to you. You want an answer to the question.”
“Yes, something like that. Something in the manner…in the way they were written.” Pierce no longer felt afraid. The man on the phone sounded tired and friendly and open; it was the way he imagined someone who worked for a suicide hotline might speak. There was trust in that voice, and a bruised kind of dignity. The man sounded …world-weary. Yes, that was the clichéd description that sprang to mind.
Then the phone went dead, and Pierce almost screamed.
Frantically he tried the number again, but knew before it happened that the line would ring out and never be answered. Soon it went dead, the automatic cut-off system breaking the connection. All he could hear was a thick wet crackle, like tinfoil being dragged through mud. He replaced the receiver into its cradle and lay down on the sofa. Closed his tired eyes.
Later, wide-eyed in the early hours, he tried to watch one of Sandra’s DVDs – a film they’d both enjoyed: a light romantic comedy set in some idealised version of London. After putting the disc into the machine and sitting back with a glass of whisky, he stared at the dark screen.
No
matter how hard he tried, Pierce was unable to make out anything apart from the vaguest suggestion of movement within that slightly reflective gloom: a stirring, coiling motion, like fattened intestinal tracts pulsing, or huge snakes tying knots in themselves. He gave up after several repetitive moments, feeling afraid and slightly nauseous. Sitting before the empty television screen, both TV and DVD player unplugged, he watched the same dim, peristaltic scenes unfolding before his unbelieving eyes until the sun came up and burned the images away.
IV
The following day Pierce walked the streets of Scarbridge in an exhausted daze, ending up in an unfamiliar and quietly threatening district sometime shortly after noon. Starved of ideas, he called into a pub called the Royal Doubloon and ordered a pint of Starapramen. The strong Czech lager cooled his throat as he drank, and he felt light-headed after only a single mouthful. The events of the past few days were having a strange effect on him, making him lethargic, thoughtful and lonelier than ever before. His thoughts turned often to Sandra, and how he should probably return home to save his marriage. But the motivation was not there. It was all too tiresome, and he doubted that there was any real love left between them anyway. Loneliness bloomed within and around him like a vast black flower, its odour an overpowering charnel stench. He felt enveloped by his aloneness, and a great weight was pinning him down onto the earth, where other people seemed float above the ground like angels.
Something deep inside - some vague and distinctly parasitic sensation - seemed to enjoy his pain. It was as if he was wallowing in it, feasting on his own turmoil like a beggar at a banquet. He wondered if other people sometimes felt like this, or if there was something profoundly wrong with him at a psychological level. Then he ordered another pint of strong lager, hoping that if he drank enough of them the pain, and his secret enjoyment of it, would fade into the background.
It was just after ten o’clock when the woman approached him. She was tall, too thin for her build, and wore a lot of make-up on her wide face. Her clothes were tacky and inexpensive catalogue items, and she wore them a size too small to emphasise curves that were barely even there. If he’d been sober, Pierce would have run a mile; as he was pissed and tired and sick of his own company, he welcomed her with a creased smile. It was all the encouragement she needed, and she sat next to him on a low stool.
Drink?” he said.
“G and T,” she replied curtly, and attempting a pouting grin. The skin on her face pulled taut, giving her broad features a skull-like appearance.
Pierce finished his lager, then went to the bar and ordered. His feet were uncoordinated and his eyes wouldn’t focus properly, so he held onto the backs of chairs as he stood waiting for the drinks. He slopped some of his lager down the front of his jacket on his way back to the table, but the woman didn’t seem to notice. She sat and smeared bright red lipstick onto her thin lips, inspecting her handiwork in a small compact mirror.
After another two or three drinks, and some dreary, slurred small talk, the woman invited Pierce back to her place. They took an unlicensed mini cab to a cramped suburban street and the woman unlocked the battered front door to a grubby terraced house. Pierce followed her inside, his mind in a place way beyond paranoia.
“Fifty for straight sex. I do not do anal or roughhouse,” said the woman as she walked on kitten heels down a long, bare hallway. He realised for the first time that she had a slight accent: possibly eastern European. Polish? Czechoslovakian? He couldn’t be sure.
“I…er, yes. That’s fine,” said Pierce, suddenly grasping the meaning of her words. The house was austere, the walls painted plaster; this was obviously a temporary abode for a working girl. He suddenly wished that he could sober up in an instant, like they did in the movies.
The woman appeared from a doorway, shadowy kitchen appliances lying in wait in the dark room behind her, and grabbed his arm as she headed for the stairs. Her cheap shoes made a loud clip-clopping sound on the bare boards as she led him up onto the first floor landing. The door that led onto the main bedroom was scarred, and looked like someone had recently tried to put a fist through it. The room contained a single bed and nothing more: no pictures on the rough white walls, no carpet on the dirty wooden floor. There weren’t even any curtains up at the windows.
Pierce fought the nausea that was rising in his throat, and watched in silence as the woman undressed in a sodium spotlight at the centre of the hollow room. Her arms were skinny, with track marks on the pasty flesh of her forearms, and her small breasts sagged like empty paper bags. When she stepped out of her underwear, he tried to look away, but his gaze was drawn to the shaven area between her legs. Razor rash shone there in blotchy red shrieks beneath the paltry light that bled in through the windows, and her loose belly flopped above like a dead fish.
The woman’s lifeless suit of skin, he thought, seemed to slither.
The sex was awkward and dysfunctional. Pierce struggled to maintain an erection, and the woman’s poorly choreographed attempts at seduction only made things worse. In the end he faked an orgasm just to get some rest, and threw the empty condom she had provided far into a dark corner where it lay curled up like a dead snail gouged from its shell.
When the woman began to snore loudly and mutter darkly in her sleep he got out of bed, crossed to the grimy window, and looked down at the street below. Litter struggled in the gutter, and a few sparse trees waved gnarly limbs from unkempt patches of gardens. A man with a handheld video camera darted through the tiny gardens, as if caught in the act of filming something he shouldn’t.
Pierce felt like throwing up, but he fought and defeated the urge. Sandra’s face surfaced in his mind, as if breaking the surface of dark waters, and he strained to push her back down into the gloomy depths; she didn’t need to see this.
He padded out onto the landing, looking for the bathroom. When he found it he voided his bladder in the brown-stained bowl, averting his gaze from whatever floated in it. On the mirror to his left, scrawled in thick red marker, was another tantalising question - or was it the same one, simply phrased differently.
What’s in the way?
Pierce knew without even having to consider anything else that this was another clue. A fresh point on the compass. Whatever he was searching for was closer than he might think, and the message seemed to be that he should keep on looking, keep on pushing. But what was it he was searching for? That was the million-dollar question, the Golden Fleece, the puzzle wrapped up in an enigma.
The truth was that he really didn’t know. He was looking, and that was all. And if he was very lucky he just might find something. Something in the way.
And what of that man with the camera? Had he, in fact, been filming Pierce? Following him and recording his movements on tape? Was this some kind of initiation he was required to experience before deep secrets could be revealed?
He left the prostitute’s shabby den without even going back into the bedroom to retrieve his coat. Shame and regret and an inchoate sense of guilt pushed him out of the door and into the dawning day as she shouted clipped foreign words at his back. As he ran along an unfamiliar street, then cut up a cobbled alley and headed for a set of traffic lights on a main road, he wondered what had gone so tragically wrong with his life that he was chasing graffiti messages through darkened streets.
It had set in long before Sandra had left, this ennui, and was probably the main reason that she had done so. Nothing had really interested him for over a year now, and he couldn’t pinpoint the reasons why. He was just bored, lonely, disinterested; that was why he was desperately searching for patterns where there were none. It was like trying to catch rain in the palm of your hand when you are thirsty, pointless and sad yet somehow necessary.
He let his body fall against a dirty wall in the alley, his legs buckling beneath him and his body falling heavily onto the rough cobbles. He sat there for a while, head in his hands, heart in his mouth, and prayed for answers to questions that he couldn’t even ask. W
hat was wrong with him? Why wasn’t it enough? His marriage, his house, his job, his life…
Pierce retrieved his notebook from the back pocket of his trousers and scribbled frantically. The words he wrote were meaningless, but the act calmed him enough so that he could gather his thoughts.
Sandra; he thought of her now. Of her face when she had walked out the door: downcast eyes, blank and uncomprehending; tears glistening like slivers of ice on her rounded cheeks; her mouth a slit in the thin pale blur of her face. If he was unable to understand what was happening to him, then how the hell was she supposed to? Mid-life crisis, he thought, the onset of middle age fucking with his emotions, churning him up inside.
On his feet again, he walked to the end of the alley, refusing to look at the walls in search of more arcane messages in thick red scrawls. He hailed a passing mini cab and paid a surly Nigerian fifty pounds to get home, glad of these moments of normality amid the bizarre landscape that his life had become.
The sun rose unenthusiastically through a grubby sky outside his window, smearing its glare across the ash-grey cityscape, and he sat staring at the phone. He had memorised the number, but didn’t dare dial it. What if it remained unanswered this time, ringing out into some unknown digital night? Or, perhaps worse still, what if it was answered, and the revelation he sought was uttered, whispered like a dirty secret in a tatty room? What if it wasn’t what he needed? What if it was? The fear was all consuming, tearing at him like a pack of ravenous hounds, baring his insides piece by bloody piece. He felt flayed, laid bare beneath a staring sky. But he also felt a faint glimmer of hope, like a guttering candle flame, flickering delicately at the centre of everything that he was.
