Bebo

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	Chapter One
	Sunday 7:40 am You always know when to bail out. It’s a special skill you learn, but at times it can be a fine judgement. As a general guideline, you should start to think about that long walk/drive home sometime not too long after dawn. Just about when the birds start to sing. Just about now in fact. Someone upstairs is watching Sunday morning TV. Too-bright cartoons which make no sense, only ever seen by five-year-old children and people like us. I realise that I have smoked my cigarette right down to the filter and flick it away to land on the lawn. It’s chillier than I’d thought sitting here on this doorstep, which is still cold to the touch. The early morning sunshine has had no time yet to soak into the stone. The smoke rising from the burning dog end looks very white against the vivid green grass. It is the only thing moving in a landscape of absolute stillness. I pick up a couple of beer cans which are lying around the garden and fling them over the back fence. I pause for a moment, my hand on the door handle, letting the quiet wash through me. There is no stillness in the world like a town in the very early morning. Silence where the people and cars should be. A shroud over the streets. Cats and birds moving quietly in a post-dawn church of calm. Inside there were people crashed out in the living room, motionless bodies in sleeping bags and under duvets. There were a pair of bright red Adidas Sambas sticking out from under a blanket on the sofa. I knew straight away who they belonged to, no one else in the western world would even consider wearing trainers that tasteless. When I pulled back the blanket sure enough there he was, Stevie Dead, passed out and living up to his name. I shook his shoulder and asked if he wanted a lift home. He muttered something which sounded like, flegarrrgh, rolled over, farted and went back to sleep. I shrugged and draped the blanket back across his shoulders. The murmur of voices floated gently down the stairs. I stood at the bottom, listening. As far as I could make out, someone had gone out a couple of hours ago with everybody’s money, trying to find more pills. Another, louder voice, it sounded like Combat Mike’s, was suggesting getting a bottle of vodka when the shops opened. I didn’t want to be involved. I needed to find my jacket because my car keys were in the pocket. I had to hunt for a good five minutes before I found it, thrust between an armchair and the wall. I went quietly through to the kitchen, closing the door behind me and emptied the contents of my jacket pockets onto the kitchen table. My keys were there all-right, along with two half-empty packets of chewing gum, a battered and much abused fag packet (which still contained one battered and much abused but mercifully unbroken Regal King Size), a red plastic lighter and a little folded square of paper. I stuffed keys, lighter and fag back into my pocket and with great care and shaky hands unfolded the wrap. There was still a fairly healthy line of speed in there, a white powdery residue against brightly coloured paper that had been inexpertly cut from a porno mag. I tipped it out on the table and rummaged for a bankcard. I found a cracked Royal Bank of Scotland auto-cash card and used it to chop the speed into a line. I did it up my left nostril because the right one still felt sore and blocked from the crushed up pill I’d snorted sometime last night. The speed would do me good. One last little dunt to keep my head from falling apart until I got home. I licked my finger and dabbed at the powdery dregs on the table. My watch said seven forty-five. Time to go. I let myself quietly out of the front door and into the bright morning light. My car was sitting in the driveway, rusting quietly. It was an elderly blue Ford Fiesta and quite frankly, I was in two minds about whether the fucking thing would start at all. I had to fiddle with the keys in the door for what seemed like a long time before it would open. I turned the radio on and slipped the key into the ignition. Looking skywards I said a little prayer before I turned it. My flat was only a five-minute drive away. But a five-minute drive is a twenty-minute walk and in my present incapable condition I doubt I’d even make it to the end of the road. The engine grumbled and complained but in the end it started. It was almost eight in the morning but the streets weren’t empty. Who the fuck are these people? I see them about this time every weekend. Strange ugly people in tracksuit bottoms walking dogs or buying newspapers. Steering with one hand I shake the last fag out of my packet and prod it into the side of my mouth. The radio is playing some manufactured plastic boy-band shite, so while I’m waiting for the dashboard lighter to pop out, I find my Chemical Brothers tape and slot it into the deck. The lighter made me jump when it popped out. I was so startled in fact that I had taken a good few draws of my fag before I realised that I had lit the wrong end and was now smoking filter. Pulling a face I went to spit it out of the window, only remembering half way through this manoeuvre that the window wasn’t open. Unfortunately it was too late. The glowing filter exploded against the glass in a shower of sparks, before the rest of the thing (still burning) disappeared down the side of my seat. I said a bad word. There was enough paper-based litter down there to make me very uneasy. I began to smell burning. I said a whole string of bad words. There was an Allday’s up ahead with its own car park, I pulled in and brought the car to a juddering halt. Leaping out I began to scrabble franticly under my seat, tossing crumpled (and in some cases smouldering) rubbish behind me onto the tarmac. When I was finally satisfied that my car was not about to burst into flames I sat back on the ground, breathing heavily. When I looked up one of the dog walking, paper buying, Sunday people was standing not two meters away, regarding me with a suspicious expression on its face. I felt like one who has come suddenly and unexpectedly face to face with some rare and wonderful wild animal, and must in that one frozen second take in every detail and commit it to memory. Because in the next few moments that animal is surely going to bolt…. “I’m, eh, just, eh, you know.” But evidently he didn’t know, because he looked at me as if I had a third eye and scuttled off in the direction of the shop. Realising I was now devoid of fags, I checked that my wallet was in my jacket pocket and sauntered rather unsteadily after him. The fluorescent strip lights and brightly coloured displays of the shop hurt my eyes but I was still able to give my new friend a wave. He scowled at me from behind a pyramid made from cans of cat food. I bought a large bottle of Lucozade and twenty Embassy No 1. The woman who served me was coldly hostile. I stood and stared at the bottles of spirits behind the counter and wondered absently what she would do if I just suddenly crawled over there and started drinking. I wonder how drunk I could get before the police arrive. I do not, however have the energy for all that. I just take my fags and go. It’s not until I have parked outside my flat and am half way up the stairs that I realise exactly how bad I feel. I feel poisoned, exhausted, like my insides had been burnt with acid. There is a hard knot in my stomach, a taste of chemicals in my mouth and nose. My joints ache, my head hurts, feels; as if I’ve run a marathon, no, a dozen marathons, fuck it, a thousand. My keys take an age to slot into the lock. My rugby playing dickhead flat mate is not at home (He has gone away for the weekend and will thankfully not return until Monday morning). So I don’t have to worry about him moaning at me for waking him up at this horrible hour. Wearily, I made my way into my bedroom, and among the dog eared books and tatty posters stripped off my clothes until they were nothing but a crumpled pile in the curtained half dark. I crawled under my duvet and eyes closed, listening to my breathing, slipped down…down into that horrible half world that only the pill-head knows. You lie in a feverish crumpled heap beneath sweaty duvets, the same thought looped in your head for hours, circling endlessly like a rat in a cage. A tangled cellar of half formed thoughts and half dreamt dreams, mixing, fading in and out of each other like spilled mercury. Tossing, turning, ensnared in chaotically twisted sheets. Grinding your teeth, mumbling random words, your body a puppet of your chaotically twisted mind. And when you surface, sometime hours later, you can never truly say if you’ve slept or not. The glowing red numbers on my clock said 2:37. I lay looking at them for a long time, until around 3:02, when thirst and a growing need to pee forced me from my bed. I take a long hot shower, scrubbing myself vigorously to wash away the smoke and grime of the weekend. I emerge feeling a little better, not a lot, but still better. As I towel myself dry I take long swigs from the bottle of Lucozade I bought on my way home. It tastes bad and the bubbles sting my nose but it’s wet at least. I mooch about the flat unable to decide what to do with myself. My head feels as if someone has removed the brain and stuffed it instead with cotton wool. Sunday. Come-down day. I fucking hate Sundays. There are lots of good reasons to hate Sundays. Comedowns, hangovers, paranoia, emptiness, crap TV. My own personal reason is that Sunday is the day before Monday. And we all know what happens on Monday. A bad fish. A very bad fish indeed. Have you ever had a truly fulfilling Sunday? Unless you drink your way through it, Sunday is limbo. Dead time, where the weekend metamorphosises into the working week. All the colour seems to drain from the world. The good times have departed for another week, leaving everything scraped out and hollow and used. The week stretches out in front of you, long and grey like a prison corridor that goes on and on. Your only consolation is that if you squint your eyes, on the distant horizon you can just about make out what might be the shimmer of bright lights. Stevie Dead comes round at teatime. He is wearing a Scotland shirt with, DEAD 13, printed on the back of it. “Fucking hell, you look rough,” he says. Coming from a man who got his nickname for looking like a corpse I find it difficult to take this as a compliment. We sit in the living room smoking dope and watching the Antiques Roadshow. As I curl up on the sofa, beginning to feel a little stoned, I get the story of Stevie’s weekend. What it basically boils down to is this. A - He thinks he may have shagged this really ugly girl that we both know, but is not sure. And B - He is never taking drugs or drinking again. I have heard both these things before. When I enquire after Combat Mike, Stevie rolls his eyes and tells me that Mike did indeed get his bottle of vodka and is at this precise moment in the pub. This is what we call a Super Sunday. He warns me that he was talking about coming round here later. I smile and tell him that if Mike comes round here and wakes me up, I will push him down the stairs and steal his watch. We spend the evening watching videos, smoking dope and laughing like idiots. Mostly at how bad we feel. Stevie leaves around nine. I am not the only one who has to be at work in the morning. I lock the door and turn the lights out in case Combat Mike, who does not, takes it upon himself to turn up and keep me company. I go to the window and look out at the town bathed in the eerie orange glow of the streetlights. Because my flat is on the third floor I can see all the way across town to where the streetlights end and the dark spaces of the countryside begin. I just stand there looking for what seems like a very long time. I have been here too long. Twenty-two years. Twenty-two years in this fucking shit hole. I was born in the local hospital at about two in the morning of the 7th of September 1979. I grew up living with my Mum and Dad in a little house barely five minutes drive away from this flat. When I went, hiding behind my mother’s skirts, to attend my first day at school, it was the local primary school. From the window of my flat I can actually see the secondary school where I spent my weekdays for half a decade. It looms bulky, black and disapproving on the edge of my vision. When I finally found a job it was in a meat-processing factory less than fifteen minutes drive out into the country. Like I said, I have been in this place, this town, for far too long. Eventually I come away from the window. I go to bed and lie there in the darkness. Brooding. Combat Mike turns up around midnight. He hammers on the door and swears, spending a full ten minutes calling me a part timer, a bailer and a cunt. I ignore him and eventually he goes away. It is all very well for him to say these things, he doesn’t have to get up in the morning. At some point I drift off to sleep. Something was making a noise. A horrible buzzing sound that drills right through me, making me grit my teeth. It took my sleep-muddled brain a long slow minute to make sense of the sound. An alarm clock, I thought. My alarm clock. Oh fuck. It can’t be, my brain protested. You only went to bed about half an hour ago. This must be some terrible mistake. I opened one reluctant eye. Five thirty; there was no mistake. I hauled myself out of bed, my body protesting, feeling abused that it was required to be awake and fully operational at such an unreasonable time. My head was still thick with sleep as I made my sandwiches and boiled the kettle. I sat in the bath for a good half-hour, eating hot buttered toast and drinking a mug of tea. I have done this every morning for the last four years. This half-hour’s semi-doze in a warm friendly tub gives me the time I need to wake up properly. But more importantly it gives me just a little breathing space to get my shit together, to steel myself against the horrors of the working day. When the hands on the bathroom clock have finally crept their way round to six fifteen I pull myself out of the bath with a disappointed little sigh. As I towel myself dry a familiar sense of dread begins to grow within me. It increases as I dress and then bag in hand make my way to the door. Combat Mike is lying curled up asleep in the little hallway outside my flat. He actually looks pretty peaceful lying there, for the moment blissfully unaware of the evil hangover which must surely be waiting to greet him as soon as he wakes up. After a couple of seconds of internal debate I leave the door on the latch so when he recovers consciousness he will be able to get in. This at least should stop him pissing in the hallway. Gingerly I step over his slumped form and make my way down the stairs and outside into the crisp dawn light. It is cold despite the watery sunshine and there is a thin layer of frost on the windscreens of the cars. Birds twitter to themselves, the only sound in the hush of morning. On mornings like these I often feel the urge to just say, Fuck it, and get myself a coffee and a newspaper and find a nice park bench to sit on and enjoy the morning. Maybe later go for a long walk in the country or up in the hills or something. I don’t know, do something spiritually enriching with my day, anything. Anything’s better than standing at a fucking conveyer belt all day. The drive to work is both good and bad. Good because I am not actually at work yet. Bad because I soon will be. As I drive I observe another one of my daily rituals. The first cigarette of the day. Always the same, as I turn right out of my street I am fumbling a fag out of the packet, lighting it as I pass the shop on the left. The one with, BARY IS A BIG GAY CUNT, spray painted across its steel shutters in blue letters a foot high. Most of the time (and today is no exception) the first fag of the day tastes like shit, but I could no more do with out it than I could forgo my morning bath in favour of a quick shower. By the time I have smoked the fag almost all the way down to the filter, I have left the town behind and my little blue Fiesta is meandering its way along familiar country back roads. I flick my fag end out of the window at roughly the same point in the journey everyday. Into the ditch at the side of the road, beside a field which contains a bored looking horse. If I cared to hop out of the car and inspect the contents of the ditch I’d be willing to bet I’d find four years worth of fag ends. A dirty soggy foul smelling mess. Four years of my life. Just before you get to the factory there is a hill. A long upward sweep that you have to drop down into third gear to tackle. Before I get to the top, because I can’t see it yet, the factory doesn’t exist. Until I can see it, I’m all right. I am in a nice comfortable car, the radio is playing. I could be out for a pleasant drive in the country. This is the shred of comfort I cling to as the final seconds of my morning that belong to me crawl slowly away. As the car pulls closer to the crest of the hill a little voice inside my head tries to reassure me. You’re ok. You’re ok. You’re ok. You’re… Nooooooooooooooooooooo. Fuckfuckfuckbastardshitefuckbastardfuck­fuckfuck. And so I arrive at my place of employment. I pull into the dusty car park at exactly quarter to seven, which gives me fifteen minutes before clock in time to try and find a boiler suit which fits properly. In the silence after I turn the engine off the little double click as I set the handbrake is almost unbearably depressing. I am thinking dark thoughts as I haul myself out of the car and crunch my way across the gravel of the car park. I prey that I will arrive to find that there has been a sudden outbreak of plague or malaria or syphilis or something and the Health and Safety people have shut the factory down for the day. I never get too greedy in this fantasy, after all, I’m not asking for a whole week off or anything. In my head this makes it seem somehow more likely to happen. The factory itself consists of two huge red corrugated metal buildings (the one on the left is the game and venison department, the one on the right is the factory proper). There is also a canteen/laundry/staff locker room and an office. Although these are kept separate so the nice office people do not have to mix with the factory monkeys. Across the side of the factory building in white letters bigger than god’s handwriting is emblazoned the legend. Jack Benzies Catering Butchers. It is the first thing you see as the car pulls over the crest of the hill. It leaves you in absolutely no doubt about whom you have sold your soul to. The changing room has a really unpleasant smell, one part sweat, one part wet meaty overalls, one part something else. I have never been able to figure out what it is. Does despair have a smell? I don’t know. Maybe. There are a couple of guys in the changing room, John and Fat Andy from packing, and some woman from the Venison department whose name I can’t remember. I grunt to them and they nod at me morosely. I find a boiler suit which fits at the third attempt, which is pretty good going. I open my locker and haul out my rubber boots. They are bright white just like everything we have to wear. With all my kit on, I bear a strange resemblance to one of the minor henchmen in a Bond movie. You know the ones I mean, they mill around in the evil genius’s underground complex carrying clipboards, looking at dials, generally putting the finishing touches to the evil genius’s fiendishly stupid master plan. Until, that is good old James turns up to massacre them. My helmet (I suppose the correct name for it should be hard hat but I prefer helmet, ok) is easy to find. It’s the one with - BORN TO KILL - written on it. The blue hairnet inside is a bit manky looking and smells none too fresh. I toy with the idea of going to the laundry to get a new one but a quick glance at my watch tells me it’s two minutes to clock-in. Fuck the hairnet I think to myself. I smile crookedly at my reflection in the mirror. In my white suit, boots and helmet it looks as if I’m about to go into space rather than spending all day working on a burger production line. There are still a few people waiting to clock in. I dawdle across the tarmac between the canteen/changing room block and the factory, trying to make the walk last as long as possible. As I get to the door I take a deep lungful of air. It is the last free air, non-factory air, I will breathe for quite some time. There is a new clock card waiting for me, a blank clock card. Of all the bad things about Monday morning, this must surely be the worst. The nasty little click the clock-in machine makes as it gobbles my card sounds exactly like a key turning in a lock. As I shuffle forwards the smell of the factory fills my nostrils.
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