by J.W. Carey
I want; I want and want and want and fill myself with other things. Sugar. Lights. Painkillers. Alcohol. Words, words, words like a prayer spoken in tongues. I was born with something missing; I don’t know what. I can’t know what. If I knew what was missing, I’d find it; I’d ram it back into place; I’d fake it. But I don’t.
I’ve never been happy. I don’t think that I’m capable of being happy.
It isn’t something I forget either. When I’m drunk, when I’m high, when I’m in bed with a woman that tells herself she loves me and likes to lie to me as well, when I’m busy at work; I don’t forget the want. The need. The hunger that sits at the back of my throat – this hunger for more, for something more, for anything more. An end would be more. I need something sweet, something sour; something from one extreme to the next, to break through you Solpadol my protector, to break through you and take the taste of self-loathing away.
I have no right to be, but I am broken. There was no trauma, no accident or bloody memory to leave me damaged, save that I emerged crying, blinking into the sterilised air and sterilised gloves and sterilised tears.
***
“I think it all might have been okay, if I could’ve fucked her once, you know? Just once. If I could have loved her and left my love within her. All of the future could have hung on a twist of the wind, on the simple distance between our lips; hanging back on the locking of eyes – I’d rather kiss someone than look them in the eye.”
I dream of telling the younger couple that; of baring my soul beneath her inhuman beauty, her fallen angelic grace and his rising ape. I dream of confession, that it might fill the hole that has become me – the hole filled with drinks and early nights. She has that effect on me, she makes me crazy; makes me social and mad.
I try to picture what she looks like now – I can’t do it. In my head, she’s the same; we’re still seventeen; she’s still smiling at me across and empty classroom, she’s still dancing in a book store, she’s still at her grandad’s funeral and sending me texts because she doesn’t recognise her family. I remember her crying in a cinema, and rushing out with tears on her face and, seeing me coming after her, breaking into a run. I remember being the last person she wanted to see.
The painkillers were firmly in my head now; I could tell. Everything was coming at me through a thick haze; when it broke behind the clouds, the sunlight was blinding but I could stare straight out of the window without blinking. My heart beat and my blood pulsed around my body and that I could feel; I couldn’t feel the hard chair against my back, I couldn’t feel the pull in my calves that spoke of sleeping on a couch, I couldn’t feel my fingertips as they tapped against my thigh, but I felt everything else. I felt my liver filtering, my lungs wheezing, my brain stagnating, my stomach considering hunger. I felt blood in my veins, in my arteries, my teeth cutting at my gums, my eyes drying out and twitching, my throat swallowing around nothing.
In Solpadol, every thought came at me like someone else’s suggestion; I heard the thought, considered it, forgot about it and felt the last neurons fire in response. Someone told me that I had hours to kill before I could meet her; was there any point going home? Home to a silent room covered in posters; home to silent parents gestating in front of the television screen and buying collectibles to fill the empty spaces on their walls, in their cupboards – buying new cabinets to present their waste like trophies? Or would I sit in front of my computer and vanish for hours, fading in and out of the haze like I was stuck on the second day of a weekend hangover?
No, someone told me, I will not go home yet.
The young couple get off a couple of stops before me, and I watch her raise herself to weary feet and trail after her boyfriend. She looked so tired, living with her decisions, and she would have been easy to love.
I get off the train, as I have done a thousand times before. I think I see an angel standing at the top of the stairs, but it’s just the way that the sunlight comes through the open doorway. Even before I’ve passed her shadow, I can taste the coal-dust in the air; or someone tells me that I can. Coal is a romance that hangs over this town like a shroud, that moved through the thoughts in silent and subtle ways. It was a romance that curled about the larynx and tightened and left you choking. This place; it can render a man mute, if you let it.
I walk up the road, passed the closed takeaways and the imported food stores; passed the gambling dens and the mobile phone unlockers. Reflections of me, or someone, reflect in the shop windows and I force myself not to look. I succumb, and take a few fleeting glances at the shape of my body, at the curve of my shoulders and the angle of my arms, at the state of my hair. You would look better as a silhouette, someone said to me; like a blackened image in a burnt-out retina.
The streets are still a little empty; not every shop is open yet, not every employee has dragged themselves from their bed and blinked bleary-eyed in the morning. I find that I am following someone, unconsciously. My feet follow a tall, broad-faced woman as she cuts through the old shopping centre. It is dead, uniformly; clinging to centre of this place like an old God still demanding that fire be ignored and that stone is all we need.
Empty windows, lonely pillars and a single yellow ‘cleaning-in-progress’ sign greet us beneath the centre’s shadows. She is moving much faster than me, and it doesn’t take me long to lose sight of her. I don’t mind. I hate walking through these old causeways of commerce, like a failed dream, like unrequited love.
I dream, then, that I am following someone else. Some ghost that knows these steps as well as I do. I follow the spectre left, and then right, and down an escalator to where the first of the stores were opening. At the jewellers, a young woman with neon-red hair smiles at me as she typed in the code to an electric lock. I make the mistake of smiling back at her, and I can feel her revulsion. I do not have a nice smile; it twitches across my face like a spasm of dishonesty; it makes a mockery of my emotions.
When I cut back onto the street, I see a family in the middle distance. They are all stabbing at the air with their hands and voices. The mother is overweight, and leans heavily against the handle of a pram as through it were a crutch. One of the children lolls in its seat like a cocaine addict, rocking its head back and forth like it had a hope of warding off nightmares. The other child slouches in his tracksuit; his face is flat and wide, threatening masculinity at the world from small, suspicious eyes.
When we pass each other, I can’t help but feel the divide. It breaks in the air around us, creates shrapnel out of oxygen that we can never get passed. I avoid looking at them, but the youngest child stares at me in something like disbelief. I might as well be staring at them. I think I hate them; I think they hate me. We’d all be fools not to hate each other.
* * *
Am I an artist yet?
I sit in my uncomfortable chair, from which the padding has long since been flattened, or picked away by my worrying fingertips, and I listen to the questions that Solpadol asks of me. I do not know if they exist because I allow them to, because I have been so damaged by my own grasping desires, or because I desire to cultivate the appearance of the artiste – because I want to be a starving artist.
Have I been forgiven, for the sins I have committed, so long as those sins brought me here, to this moment, to the sensation of individual keys beneath my fingertips?
Do I want to be forgiven, or do I rejoice in my vileness, in my disrespectability; is forgiveness a chain around my throat, or shackles about my ankles, strings coiling above my limbs like living things and leaving me in the air, trapped, so high above it all? Like my own marionette.
Can I even call myself human anymore – have I surrendered such a title in favour of my dreams, that I might be an author, clothed in italic font? One cannot be alive and aware at the same time – we all need to sacrifice one moment for another; consider every moment a memory, something to look forward to, and nothing else.
Such thoughts dare to make their home w
ithin my head as I stare at the small pile of ragged paper on my shelf. They had originally been full-sized sheets of printer paper, but I have cut them in half with a guillotine I borrowed from a neighbour of mine. They aren’t evenly cut, some are slightly slanted, some had been torn as the dulled blade snagged, and some have cut in the wrong place, leaving me with some sheets a millimetre too wide and some a millimetre too slim. I imagine, I’m good at that, that to someone staring at those papers for the first time those discrepancies might not be noticeable.
I know those pages intimately. I have spent months creating them, pouring over them, rereading them and striking out entire paragraphs with shuddering black pen strokes – wavering lines as my resolve faltered half-way through the decision. I have tortured the man on those pages. I have not abandoned him, but I have subjected him to the very worst of my attention. The world on those pages is not one I have created, but one I dream of and wake from and wake to every day of my life. It is the world, seen through the eyes of a poet who cannot write poetry, as I see it through the eyes of a normal man who willingly, desperately, rejects his normality. And, now, I am desperate to see the world any other way but the way of the coward, the malefactor; the Caitiff.
I want to be an artist. Those pages burn with it; that desire; they cut at my fingers when I touch them and cut at my conscience when I read them and leave me mute, critical and disappointed. All art is nothing but smoke the following morning; no art can face the sunlight. The cheap texture of that paper is a silk agony against me; an oily warfare against my fingertips. Even these thoughts are a pleasure to me – I rejoice in my ability to think of simple things in such ways, and I wonder if they are, in any way, true.
Do I string these words together in my head because I believe them to be true, or because I want them to be true, or is it merely a reaction to myself? To the clipped, slurred, guttural speech which accompanies me throughout my day? To the accent I cannot shake, lodged between the throat and the lungs?
My art will be a means of self-expression that I cannot find elsewhere – the laws of decency keep me from screaming in the street, my limitations keep me from dim-lit stages in smoky North-Western bars and my nature keeps me from suicide.
Still, that paper sits there, that I might stare at a novel of my own, on my own shelf. Does it matter that the novel is not bound in leather, does it matter that’s its cover is an image I took myself and paid myself in alcohol and bad dance moves for? Does it matter that my novel makes its home in the electronic ether, and this one haphazard collection of expensive ink on cheap paper, with ragged and uneven edges, is the physical culmination of months of my work? Does it matter that I have been paid more to advertise inefficient businesses for an ineffective business than I have for that which I would have called my soul – a fictional soul, true, but a soul nonetheless?
Today a piece of content I wrote for an eCommerce solutions company gave that company the top position on the search engine results page for those relevant keywords. I’m not proud of it but, still, I couldn’t help myself but check. Then, twenty minutes later, I couldn’t help but check again. I checked a few minutes ago, and it makes me feel sick. Strange, truly, to measure sickness and success in such ways.
* * *
There’s a small art store which always looks empty of customers. I often take a quick look through the window when I walk past, but today is different. I have hours to kill. The paintings in the window change on a weekly basis; I assume they must get sold, to someone. Last week, there was an unimaginative collage of red skies and cut-outs of buildings and a butchered Statue of David scattered across the paper.
The main part of the window was overtaken by a large water painting, on a canvas that must have been at least three feet across and two feet tall. The landscape slowly showed the transition from a wide open field to a towering cityscape, with skyscrapers of cartoonish proportions ascending into the sky and breaking the clouds around them. There is a hazy silhouette, of a man walking away from the city with his hands in his pockets, and he seems distorted, distended; stretched to a disconcerting height. The whole canvas was in dull colours, but the man was the only black – besides him it was dark grey, dull greens and hollow blues.
Besides that, there is little of interest. A print of the town’s pubs laid out like a train station map behind a cheap frame, a picture of a naked woman with her back to the camera and a mirror of to the side, presenting a hint of her nakedness. She is very pretty.
I pass through another arcade, and move between the haunted stores that stand still, and empty. There is an elderly woman selling handbags and travel accessories from behind a tattered old stall that stinks of the rain. A few empty doors down, there’s a jewellery store called Love Forever that has been closed for half a dozen years.
When I emerge back into the grey morning light, I can see our Mecca growing out of the stone like a tumour. It isn’t a separate entity anymore, a squatter, but seems ingrained into the very soul of the town. Even at this early hour, these are black-coated figures circling it like crows or disciples. Some wear shorts with brands and logos embroidered above the heart like tattoos, some are dressed in close-fitting suits or sleek dresses but the most predominant number are dressed in the town’s uniform, grey tracksuits and hoodies or green, faux-fur-trimmed parkas.
Mecca. Grand Mecca – an arcade like any other. It is the last injection, the last bout of chemotherapy to a cancer-ridden place. The cancer had many names; poverty; welfare; pregnancy; and it attracted worshippers like flies. Some were willing, some were unwilling, some numbed and some excited by the prospect of their prayers. They go to that place and kneel in front of the cash register and pray and subscribe and, in their subscription, live.
The glass doors part like an ocean beneath the mannequin security guards. They sit, stand and lean in the latest fashions from the large department store hidden away at the back. I make a beeline for the toilet, and remember writing about graffiti on the cubicle wall. It is long gone now, replaced by the scent of fake pine. In Mecca, I only go to piss and mourn the dead, where disciples come to worship and live.
I spend about an hour in the bookstore, perhaps a little longer, and paw through fiction and history, poetry and truth and I read the first few pages of Waiting for Godot before I start to feel guilty and buy a biography on Tom Waits. I remember seeing the girl, the one I was meeting later that day, dancing a few steps as she looked for a psychology book about art. I decided to ask her if she remembered it. I decided to tell her that I’d never been happier than at that moment.
Ernest Hemmingway
I haven’t been drunk in a long time, but I’ve been drinking every day. Beside my bed, in the drawer filled with westerns and posters and guitar strings for other people’s instruments, there are three bottles of Kraken – empty, lolling, mocking me when I come to open the door and leering up from the shadows in the moments between sleep and full wakefulness. I’ve started dreaming about their namesake reaching out from the waters of Wigan Pier, breaking the stillness and the ripples of light between the cobblestones. I picture myself walking along, limping and weaving from painkillers that cause more destruction than they delay, and great black tentacles slapping against the floor.
I dream of turning to run, then they are there, and the black-iron statue of the miner overlooking the canal turns its head and smiles at me and the tentacles snap taut and I’m tearing the skin from my fingers as I try to get a grip on any one of the cobblestones. They break my lip, bloody my cheeks and burn through my clothes. The refurbished mill, a block of apartments, looms over me and I can see naked women laughing and drinking wine through the window.
When I hit the water, I’m naked. I’m pale and gasping, weak and constricted by the limbs of something much greater than I, more potent, 40% of a god that called itself inebriation and demanded obedience. I can’t see much, but I can feel the heat of the tentacles, feel the cold of the water, feel the great weight and strength and affec
tionate evil that drags me down to meet its curiosity.
It stinks; the whole goddamn business. The drinking. The drug. The incessant need and the want to be filled and I can taste it; not the booze, but the thirst for the booze. I get ill now, before I get drunk. Drink makes me soberer and mutates anger, tainted dirty anger, into the desire for pure anger; anger unfiltered, anger that doesn’t hurt anyone; anger that doesn’t let me scream at anyone but myself and the voices in the sky and the cowardly little man behind the megaphone. It stinks like lies I’ve told myself until they became true; I made them true by will and laziness and drive and apathy.
Sometimes, I imagine myself screaming; fucking howling and dragging my nails down my arms and across my chest and into the meat of my thighs. I imagine myself punching the wall, hurling punches like snowflakes against a punching bag, swinging an axe at a piece of wood until it was nothing but splinters. I imagine kneeling down in the shower, and crossing my arms across my chest and kneeling down in the shower and crying until all the world blurs and runs like paint, in great, burgeoning streams.
And, after a few seconds, I picture myself standing in front of the bathroom mirror and staring into my own eyes and looking for any hint of emotion. And there’s nothing there. Just whiskey in my irises. I can feel it, sitting on my heart, spreading between my lungs; a great weight of something that I can’t swallow. It doesn’t matter how I scream, or drink, or try to dissolve with ever increasing quantities of Solpadol, it won’t move. It won’t budge. It just sits there and makes me hate. It drips bile into my stomach, and whispers to me when I’m asleep.
* * *
My chest hurts from all the walking, and the breathing, and I need to cough every few steps to stop myself from wheezing. I try to throw my shoulders back, to walk like my teachers and my parents told me to walk, but it feels like dust wheezes out of the folded organs when I do. I stand up straight and almost choke, every goddamn time.
