Bebo

Hoofdstukken lezen

	Chapter Four
	Sunday - 6:30am. Dawn breaks slowly, soft and gentle in the east. First a pale watercolour wash, low down on the horizon and spreading, robs the stars of their brilliance until one by one they fade and disappear like precious memories forgotten. Pale and wondrous colours kiss unmoving marble sculpted clouds. Darkness recedes as morning makes love to his beautiful sister the night. Running fingers of gold through her raven hair, he whispers softly to her in the language of birdsong and the early morning mutter of a car that it is time to go. Until finally with a sigh and a kiss which could be mistaken for the breathing of the wind she dies in her lover’s arms, smiling the gentlest of gentle smiles. However, nobody notices any of this because the curtains are closed. Mike finally emerges triumphant from the kitchen with the wineglass he has been searching for for the best part of ten minutes. I stick a cigarette into the side of my mouth at a drunken angle and try to remember which one of the many cans of Tenants on the coffee table is mine. This is no trivial enterprise. Most of them are half full and most of them contain fag ends, skins, spit and sweetie papers. It's like some kind of evil lucky dip. I squint out of one eye while simultaneously lighting up with a blue plastic lighter with a cartoon frog printed on it. For some reason underneath is printed the word 'BIFFA' in large red letters. After a lot of shaking of cans and suspicious sniffing of ringpulls I am fairly certain I have found my boy. Yes, I'm sure of it. By the time I return from retching into the bathroom sink and washing my mouth out with water from the cold tap, Mike has located our bottle of vodka and has cleared a space on the table. O.K Children listen up. To snort vodka or any other alcohol (apricot brandy, gin, whisky, port, cooking sherry, rum; they're all good really, although I don't recommend Baileys) you will need: 1- Alcohol (duh). 2 - A wineglass. 3- An almost endless fund of persistent stupidity. 4 - A fair amount of space to thrash about in after. Step One. Take the wineglass and place it upside down on a suitable surface (like a table or the bonnet of your car). Step Two. Pour alcohol into the dimple on the base of the wineglass. Step three. Block one of your nostrils by pinching it shut with your index finger. Make sure you start inhaling good and hard just before your nostril makes contact with the puddle of drink. Step Four. Thrash about on the floor going 'Hnnnnggg' for a bit. After Combat Mike has thrashed about on the floor going 'Hnnnnggg' it is my turn. The burning sensation as it rushes up my nose is awful but after five minutes of wiping my bloodshot eyes and cradling my injured nose I am feeling Jim fucking Dandy. In fact we are both now in such a good mood that we decide to wake Stevie up by sticking fags up his nose. He throws them back at us and shouts. "Fuck off cunts!" Then we realise that they are the last two fags in the flat but after a little soul-searching (lasting about three and a half seconds) decide to smoke them anyway. After this we are reduced to picking the bigger dog-ends out of the ashtray and smoking them. Luckily there are several ashtrays in the room, all overflowing. Pickings are good. It has been a really long night. Combat and I decide we are hungry and besides somebody needs to get more fags. Before we go we take stock of the booze situation. Twelve cans of Tenents larger, three cans of Budweiser, a half full bottle of cheap vodka, three quarters of a bottle of Lambrini and two watermelon flavour Bacardi Breezers. "Not too shabby," Mike says, surveying the haul. I check my watch as we clatter down the stairs, waking up everyone in the building in the process. Seven fifteen. The Alldays in the square will definitely be open by now. The ugly paper-buying dog-walkers are out in force as we swagger, three sheets to the wind towards the square (actually, while we think we are swaggering, from anyone else's point of view we are probably doing a sort of semi-poisoned stagger). We stop at a hole in the wall to get cash and Mike forgets his pin-number twice and freaks out because he thinks it's going to swallow his card. He gets it right on try three however and I have to admit I am a bit disappointed. When we get there, there is an old man with a walking stick and a stinky looking dog chatting up the elderly lady who works in the shop. This doesn’t really bear thinking about at this fragile hour of the morning. She is too busy giggling and flirting like a schoolgirl to even cast a disapproving look in our direction. We laugh and joke, slagging each other right round the shop. We pick up the bare Sunday morning essentials; a copy of the Sunday Sport, a bumper pack of scotch eggs, forty Regal king size and a bottle of Irn Bru to mix the vodka with. I also try to buy a twenty-four pack of Stella and a 70cl of vodka but the horrible old bat on the cash register lets me lug it right up to the counter before smugly telling me that. "There's no alcohol before twelve." Mike buys a cap from the 'amusing' hat display. It say's - I'M WITH STUPID - on it in big white letters. When we make it back to the flat Stevie Dead is sitting weakly upright on the sofa, a tatty blue sleeping bag draped over his knees. He looks like a man in dire need of a drink. I hand him one of the Buds, then launch one at Mike and finally take one for myself. There is the crunch-fsssssss of three ringpulls being opened at once. This Sunday has just gone super by unspoken agreement. Because after we opened those cans we were fucked. If we hadn't done that we could have gone to our beds and gotten a good days sleep. No turning back now however. From here on in it becomes a matter of survival, simply keeping going because the alternative is unacceptable, too fucking horrible to even contemplate. The coming of the dawn, the departure of darkness, robs you of the illusion that what you are doing is somehow socially acceptable. A late night of drinking becomes being paralytic at Sunday lunchtime. The general public cannot handle this, especially in a small country town. Staggering about laughing and falling over in flowerbeds in the high street does not go down well with the respectable Sunday shopping types. Stevie takes a slurp and winces. "Yuk! Bad fish," he mutters. "And not a cage in sight," Mike agrees. "Yeah," I conclude wistfully. We sit breakfasting on scotch eggs and drinking vodka and Irn Bru. "This can't be healthy," Mike comments, spraying crumbs everywhere and peering suspiciously at the inside of his scotch egg. I know exactly what goes into sausage meat, but decide not to tell him until he's finished. Stevie, still encased in his sleeping bag, reads out bits of the Sport, his voice slightly muffled by the fag dangling from his mouth. "When I felt his willy slide up my bum I knew I'd never cut hair again." He takes the cigarette from between his lips and looks at us "Jesus Christ!" He says. This is the background noise to the beginning of our day. This litany of ridiculous gibberish. 'The skull of Dracula found in Whitby - scientists prove he could return to life and begin stalking virgins once more!', 'Loch Ness monster is really a Nazi submarine - pictures!' and 'The ghost of William Wallace in road rage attack!' This and the new Daft Punk album which is on repeat in the CD player. Dan has gone on some kind of leisure centre manager course. He left on Thursday night, rugby club bag slung over one shoulder with a grumpy don't make a mess of the place while I'm away. I look around. Cups with half an inch of greasy liquid in them and dirty, ketchup soiled dishes cover every surface, competing with yellow Tennents cans and bottles which used to contain a wide and interesting range of alchopops. Dirty overburdened ashtrays squat intermittently among the wreckage of the previous two days, ringed by auras of smudged grey ash. Chipper papers, kebab papers, and foil containers from the Chinese, still containing their half eaten cargoes litter the floor like half dead jurors testifying to our appalling weekend diet. A rolled up post-it-note and the suspicion of white powder on a copy of the yellow pages. Speed, coke, crushed up pills? Who the fuck knows. Who was snorting it? Was it me? Could easily have been. I throw open the curtains and let the light stream in like something solid. The horror of night has drained away, leaving us washed up like flotsam on this strange sunbright shore. Corpses with fractured memories and a desperate need for forward motion. I remember Friday night. Driving around Mashed, feeling fine, with Stevie and Mike. Then later on at Wild Things, beginning to come down and buying more, always more. No longer feeling fine, passing the rest of the early hours in a deranged, brain damaged jumble. Blind choiceless forward motion, anything to keep yourself from coming down. I think I did six or seven but it could easily have been more. Easily. An awful Saturday, spent on the sofa with clenching bloated guts and a duvet. My brain chemical soaked, forgetful and confused. A blank white space behind my eyes. Better to remain still, to concentrate on the idiot God of the TV, than to try to do anything and maybe expose the extent of the damage. Combat and Dead turned up at teatime, white faced and unhealthy looking but bearing a carryout. Mike informed me that unless I started drinking immediately he would have me gang raped by street poofs. So shakily I popped the tab on a can and went for a shower. I kind of remember walking to the Wanchor but after that there is only blackout, like dark water, a few vague images swimming slowly just beneath the surface. Someone shouting angrily at me, the circumstances lost. Leaning against a wall somewhere being sick. Fumbling for an age with my keys in the door, until someone, I think it was Wild Thing, took them off me and let everyone in. My next coherent memory is of waking up on the sofa with a terrible thirst. I opened a can of beer because it was the only drinkable thing within my field of vision. It had the effect of placating the hangover which was doubtless waiting in the wings, waiting for me to sober up properly. The drink has paid the hangover off, bought me respite until tomorrow. While this deal, signed in lager rather than my own blood, has let me off the hook for today it has given the hangover time to go away and sharpen its claws, to multiply, to double in size, to prepare. I am aware of what I am doing, aware that I am selling myself a week of feeling like I have been run physically and emotionally through Willie's mincer. Ugly paranoia about the things I did but can't remember, and the damage I may have done to myself. Depression, self-loathing, that feeling of empty worthlessness courtesy of the pills. All these things are waiting for me on the far side of this Super Sunday. Doesn't matter though, because the me I'm betraying, the me whose self respect and health I'm murdering, is someone else. A stranger. The me tomorrow is not the me today, so fuck it. All that matters is self-preservation and forward motion. All that matters is filling my glass. I pour myself a healthy belt of vodka and look around for mixer. We get steadily more drunk as the morning lurches on until we reach a plateau, there is only so drunk you can get on a Super Sunday, eventually you reach a certain level of drunkenness, which from then on you are drinking to maintain rather than to increase. Unless of course you start trying to down glasses of mixed spirits or something, in which case you will die. However, we know as our morning begins to melt and dissolve into soft pleasurable stupidity, that no matter how bad things get, they can never get as bad as The Lost Weekend (like The World’s Greatest Sandwich, The Lost Weekend deserves its capitals, believe me). I mention The Lost Weekend to Stevie and Mike. "Now that was one bad fish," Stevie says, his voice gooey with reminiscence. "Back in your cage!" Mike shouts, laughing. We can laugh about it now but it really isn't funny. To be honest we are very lucky to be alive. It all started with a pint. Those were Mike's exact words. "Let’s go down the Wanchor for a quick pint," He said. It just goes to show that you never know where even the most innocuous journey will lead you. As we walked in the late August sunshine we talked about our trip to Amsterdam. We were younger then and excited at the prospect of going abroad on a dope-smoking holiday. I would like to add at this point that as a direct result of The Lost Weekend we never went to Amsterdam, in fact to date we have never been anywhere further afield than Starski’s. I was in my first year at Benzies and Stevie had just started working at the golf course. Mike had just embarked on a college career (doing business studies of all things) and as a result had just banked a massive student loan. For the first time in our lives we all had money in the bank. We were all looking forward to Amsterdam. We were happier in those days. Stevie was enjoying his new job and I didn't mind Benzies the way I do now. It was better run then, without this constant expectation to work extra hours. I was finishing at three thirty everyday, working all week and blowing my entire pay packet on a Friday night. I was still living at home you see, no rent to pay. That was before my parents got divorced, when they could still stand the sight of each other. Before they both moved away, Mum to live with her sister Gladys in Falkirk and Dad to the south of England where he could get more work (he's a long distance lorry driver). We walked lost in the comfort which comes from a feeling that your life is rolling along just nicely thank you, enjoying the feeling of the evening sunshine in our hair and on our bare arms. The lazy country air felt wonderful in our lungs and the faint smell of shit coming from a muck laden field somewhere seemed to enhance rather than spoil the relaxing summer vibe. I had taken my first week’s holiday from the factory. That week seemed to stretch out like forever in my mind. I was looking forward to a long lie in, maybe getting up at the crack of noon, eating a bacon buttie and watching Neighbours. I had the house to myself, so no getting hassled to get out of bed at a reasonable time. Dad was away driving on the continent somewhere and Mum was on one of her endless visits to auntie Gladys. Yes, I remember thinking lazily to myself, a quiet pint then home to bed for an early night and lots of sleep. Sounds good. I had no idea exactly how wrong I would turn out to be. We arrived at the Wanchor and I ordered three pints of lager from a Barry with a full head of hair and only the ghost of a beer belly (you should see the fucker now). We sat at one of the tables, sipping our cold slightly flat beer and talked, made plans about flight times. We also decided we should get some sort of dope café guide. Stevie, as the most prolific dope smoker among us, was particularly thrilled about the whole trip. The Wanchor was dead, the warm weather seemed to have driven most people out of doors. The only other person in the place was this big evil looking cunt by the name of Martin Fraser. He was sitting at one of the back tables slumped over a pint. You could see straight away he was fucked. His eyes were heavy lidded, having trouble focusing. He was moving his lips but nothing was coming out. Vallies or Jellies or smack, some kind of downer. Barry kept throwing him disapproving looks from behind the bar. We didn't really take any notice. After a while he lurched to his feet, went for a slash and left. It was a quarter of an hour later when Stevie went to the toilet. Mike was saying something about something I don’t remember when Stevie came back and sat very carefully down on his seat, as if afraid he might misjudge where it was and end up sprawling on the floor. He looked a bit sick. "We have to go," He said softly, interrupting Mike in mid-flow. "What?" Said Mike, indignant. " I haven't finished my pi…" "Mike for once in your life shut the fuck up and listen! We have to go! Now!" Stevie hissed trying to keep his voice low. "Stevie are you all right?" I asked, concern in my voice. "Yeah fine but we just have to go. I'll explain in a minute." So we went. Mike rolling his eyes and making exaggerated sighing noises, me just wondering what the fuck was going on. Stevie was walking so fast we were half way up the street before we properly caught up with him. "Ok, what the fuck is going on?" Asked Mike angrily, slightly out of breath. Stevie looked both ways to make sure no one was about and reached into his pocket and pulled something out. It was a big bag of white powder, neatly wrapped up in cellophane. "I found it in the toilet," He said simply. Mike whistled through his teeth. "Jesus fuck!" He breathed. "It must be that cunt Fraser's." "Do you know how much that's worth if it's coke?" I asked. The question not aimed at anyone in particular. Stevie nodded unhappily. "Ok, ok," I said, speaking quickly. "We'll go up to mine and think about this. My folks are away." Stevie nodded again, this time gratefully. We sat around my kitchen table looking at the package. "It's got to be Fraser's, he knows we were the only other people in there! He'll know one of us took it!" Stevie looked scared. "I've heard about him, he's a fucking nutjob, he'll fucking kill us." "Correction," Mike said. "He'll kill you." I shot him a warning glance. "Stevie," I said, trying to reassure him. "You saw the state he was in. I doubt he'll even remember being in the Wanchor tomorrow, never mind who was there." "I suppose so," said Stevie doubtfully. "What do you think it is?" Mike poked the package with an exploratory finger. I shrugged. "Well there's only one way to find out." He started to unwrap it. "What if we just…." Stevie began but then seeing Mike wasn't going to be dissuaded gave up. Mike dipped a finger and tasted it, trying as hard as he could to look like an L.A.P.D cop in some movie about drug smuggling. "It's speed," He said, sounding disappointed. If Mike was disappointed then Stevie was quite the opposite. You could tell from just looking at his face that a great weight had lifted from him. If it had been coke then the package would have been worth a couple of grand. As it stood it was worth only a few hundred quid. Violent nutters are going to be far less bothered (although still bothered enough) about the loss of a few hundred than a few thousand, and as a result are less likely to burst their brains finding out exactly where they lost it and exactly who was about at the time. I picked the bag up and carried it carefully over to the kitchen counter and my Mum’s digital scales. "Five ounces," I said after a little mental arithmetic. "Jesus!" I plopped the bag back on the kitchen table. Mike's face was split in a Halloween-lantern grin. He looked for all the world like a small boy who has found the keys to a sweet shop. "Ok," he said, using his bankcard to shovel out a pile on the table. "Who wants a line?" And that was how the lost weekend began. Not out of any formed or conscious decision but a random chance, a weird gathering of circumstances, an act of God you might say. And while it seems like shirking responsibility to blame God for the events of the next five days, it was certainly his fault in that he provided us with the fuel to sustain it for so long. Thursday night was ok, we got stuck into the speed in a big way. It turned out to be pretty good. It kept us up all night, gibbering crap and chewing incessantly. We had one of those long speeding conversations where no-one listens to what anyone else is saying, where you grind your teeth in relentless frustration as you wait for your turn to talk. I can't really tell you what we talked about, it would probably sound pretty stupid in the sober light of day. What I do remember though is Mike changing the music every two seconds. "This is a fucking tune!" he would say. "You have got to hear this!" And then before it had really got going he would spy something else in the pile of CDs and change it again. At one point we went for a long drive, deep into the random countryside with tightly clutched bottles of Irn Bru in our sweaty hands. The ever-present cigarettes and chewing gum in our mouths, and a bag of borrowed speed as our guide. Dawn was beginning to break as we pulled into my driveway. I often wonder how many times I have seen dawn from the wrong side. Several hours later we were sat around my kitchen table in exactly the same positions we’d been in when we did our first lines. Stevie was cutting up speed with a shaky hand. He divided the large pile in front of him into three, then picked the bag up and scooped an even amount into three steaming teacups. “One lump or two?” He asked with a strange grin. We snorted our lines and took our speedy tea through to the living room, we were all beginning to feel the effects of sleep depravation. The hot blurry eyes and confused brain. The speed fried inability to do anything in any kind of logical sequence. Putting things down and then having to spend the next five minutes hunting under cushions and among the clutter on the coffee table going, fuck where’s my fags, until you discover them in your pocket. The proceedings took on that slightly hallucinatory quality which comes from prolonged lack of sleep. This was to get much, much, worse. We spent the morning and the early part of the afternoon watching shite T.V. and snorting the occasional line to keep us going. I sat and chain-smoked even though my throat was so fucked that it had actually become painful to do so. I kept coughing up this greyish green chunky shit. We decided by a democratic vote to go to the pub at about half past two. As a concession to social acceptability I brushed my teeth, sprayed on some deodorant and splashed some cold water on my face. I probably (definitely) needed a shower but the process of getting undressed, turning the shower on, washing, drying myself and then getting dressed again, seemed like a marathon of unfathomable tasks all stuck together. When I came back from the bathroom Mike was putting the finishing touches to a huge speed bomb (a little sealed pouch made from a skin, filled with speed). Eight others of equal size lay on the table in front of him. He pocketed six of them (for easy consumption in the pub) and handed one to Stevie and myself. We each swallowed one, passing round a warm beer to wash them down with. It was a hideously sunny day. I had to don a ridiculous £2.99 pair of shades I’d bought from a petrol station the week before to protect my fragile eyes from the glare. The warmth felt weird and artificial on my body like someone was following me with a portable gas fire. There was sweat pooling at the base of my spine and in my armpits by the time I had walked a dozen steps. At the end of the road we turned right rather than left. Heading for the Thistle rather than the Wanchor. My body felt strange as I walked, as if it were only marginally under my control, an unwieldy puppet held together with rubber bands. My T-shirt was beginning to stick to my chest by the time we got there. The Thistle Arms is a manky old man’s pub but if it meant not running into enraged psychopaths searching for missing drugs then it would do us just fine. The regular Friday afternoon alcoholics leaning at the bar turned to regard us with bloodshot but not unfriendly eyes before turning back to their televised darts match. A young barman with the looks and personality of an eel served us three pints and we took a seat at one of the sticky tables. I hadn’t eaten anything since Thursday lunchtime but even looking at the selection of greasy looking sausage rolls and pies in a glass case on the bar made me feel sick. I concentrated on the beer instead. Despite tasting like fizzy piss I decided it was doing me some good. Two pints later I was beginning to feel fine. Although this probably had more to do with the speed bomb than with the alcohol. I looked at myself in the dirty Guinness mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I was beginning to look decidedly bug-eyed. My brain was racing again, beginning to sharpen up in an unhinged sort of way. I was getting my second wind. We were in the middle of an argument about why they put pockets on baby clothes (what possible use do babies have for pockets?) when Stevie's face suddenly blanched. "Oh fuck," he muttered, quickly looking down into the remains of his pint. Martin Fraser was standing at the bar accompanied by a big mean looking fucker in a Rangers top. He did not look a happy bunny. "It's ok," I muttered out of the side of my mouth. "Just act casual. We'll finish our drinks and go." Despite my calm words it was the longest pint of my life. It tasted like flat ditchwater but slowly, little by little, I forced it down. Mike's customary bravado had abandoned him and Stevie looked as if he might vomit. All the time, as the liquid in our glasses was gulped away at a torturous snail’s pace, like sand in a strange set of hourglasses, I worried. Worried that even if Fraser couldn't remember much about the circumstances in which he lost the speed, the sight of us sitting here supping pints might trigger his brain into a sudden (and for us possibly fatal) spasm of recall. I worried that we would give ourselves away by looking so guilty (and so speeding). I worried that he hadn't been as fucked as he'd seemed and could remember everything. Maybe he'd just put that speed there for safe keeping, or what if somebody was supposed to pick it up! What if it was the big ugly Hun at the bar! What if he knew we were the only ones in the Wanchor between Fraser leaving and him arriving! A thousand thoughts, all bad, flashed through my paranoid sleep-starved brain. I became convinced that they knew. They fucking knew all right. Why the fuck else were they here? They'd followed us! They knew and they'd followed us, and now they were waiting for us to leave so they could slash our faces wide open with Stanley knives! We finished our drinks and looked at each other. "Ok, let's go," Mike said in a small voice. It occurred to me suddenly that exactly the same thoughts must have been going through their heads too. We got up trying to act naturally, which is as everybody knows the best way to draw attention to yourself. We stood and shrugged self-consciously into our jackets. Mike took a cigarette from his inside pocket but in trying to light it dropped his lighter on the floor and had to scramble about under the table after it. He emerged shaking slightly. The worst part was walking past the bar. We actually had to squeeze past Fraser and his mate to get to the door. Fraser looked right at me and I seemed to see a faint pop of recognition in his eyes. That's it, we're fucking dead, I thought. Then all of a sudden we were out the door and walking quickly down the street, braced to run. It was only when we reached the junction at the end of the road we realised that we weren't being followed. We looked at each other eyes wide, swimming in a sudden ocean of relief. I looked at Stevie and mimed wiping sweat from my brow. Mike burst into an impromptu chorus of, Ra-ra-rasputin, Russia's greatest love machine. "That was fucking close," I said, over Mike informing us at the top of his lungs that Ra-ra-rasputin was the lover of the Russian queen. "Yeah," Stevie said, grinning. We stopped off at the little corner shop on the end of my street to pick up a carryout. We spent the remains of the afternoon sitting in my back garden drinking and lazily doing more speed. This was not serious drinking, just a few laid back beers to help pass the time, to keep our forward motion rolling steadily on until it was a semi-acceptable time to get really fucked again. And so the first full day of The Lost Weekend slipped slowly away. It was about to get much worse. We held out until about six o'clock, then we phoned Roland. He turned up about half an hour later, sauntering down the road in a pair of shorts, a ridiculous flower patterned shirt and sandals. His unhurried lumbering gait gave him the appearance of merely being out for a walk. You would never guess he was a dealer. I saw him coming out the kitchen window and let him in the back door. He came in laughing and joking in his deep voice, a huge bear of a guy, infinitely likeable. Everybody loved Roland, he ambled from place to place selling drugs, usually with a joint in one hand and an open can of Budweiser in the other. About three weeks later he got caught with three hundred and fifty pills and a nine-bar, all cut up and ready to sell. They gave him six years. He sat down at the kitchen table, pulling a packet of skins and a big brown chunk of dope from his pocket. I offered him a beer and he downed half of it in one huge swallow. He stayed for half an hour and when he went he left a plastic zip lock bag containing twenty pills behind him. We looked at them, did some more speed, and looked at them some more. I tried to eat a packet of quavers but was only able to force a couple down. We put Jeff Mills on the stereo and drank a couple of beers, but like a moth to a flame our collective gaze would return to the bag in the middle of the table. The light from the window was taking on that soupy golden quality of a late summer evening, coating everything like airborne syrup, when we finally gave in to temptation. The cave-in of will happened suddenly, shattering our unspoken pact to hold out as long as possible. One minute we were sitting calmly listening to The Bells and the next Mike was leaning, scrambling, across the table, ripping into the plastic of the bag like a starving dog tearing into a dead body. Suddenly there were three crumbly pills in the palm of each of our hands. White freckled with brown. "Fuck it?" "Fuck it." "Fuck it." We swallowed and sat back to wait for the storm. I was on the phone when I felt the first warning signs. I was talking to Wild Thing, smoking and flicking the ash into a handy metal waste-paper bin. I was in mid-sentence, asking whether he was coming round later. I took a draw on my fag and it seemed to catch in my throat. I gagged once, my eyes watering. Fuck, that was weird, I thought to myself. Then before I could utter another word, another, far more violent gag, wracked my body, making my internal organs seem to clench upwards. "Oh fuc…." I began to mutter, but before I could finish my profanity a huge rising wave of nausea drove the contents of my stomach (mostly beer and yellow bile) out of my mouth like a fist. And then, as suddenly as it had come it was gone, leaving me shaking and tingly, holding a wastepaper bin full of sick. Gasping and wiping my eyes, thinking that triple dunting on an empty stomach and no sleep had perhaps not been the worlds best idea, I finished my conversation and hung up. I took the bin outside, rinsed it out from the outside tap and threw the contents over the fence into my neighbour's geraniums. The fag was still in my hand. I took a cautious draw, wary of inducing another vomiting attack. My guts seemed ok, no gagging at least, so tentatively, I smoked the rest of it. By the time I had finished I was totally fucked. I looked up from stubbing the fag out and was hit smack in the face by an incredible rush of intensity. The garden looked exactly the same as it had done before, except cranked up about ten notches. The sunlight was incredibly bright and flowing, the colours of the flowerbeds jumped out at me. Their smell and the smell of grass, the droning of bees was almost overwhelming. Our small scruffy lawn looked like a living pea green rug sown with daisies. The dimensions of the garden had subtly shifted too, it seemed to have become smaller, more concentrated, more alive. Feeling decidedly unsteady on my feet I lurched my way back into the house, all the way feeling as if I were taking giant steps. I flopped onto the sofa feeling as if I were floating up and away from my body. I looked at Stevie, leaning back into the cushions on the other end of the sofa. He seemed further away than he should have. His pupils were gigantic, his jaw moved from side to side, looking alarmingly like it had been dislocated. He exhaled slowly. “Fucking hell,” he said, the words distorted by his uncontrollable mouth movements. Mike, slumped in the armchair opposite, appeared to be trying to bite his shoulder. Stevie put a CD on. He seemed to be having difficulty figuring out how the buttons on the stereo worked, but eventually, after a few stop-starts, he got it going. High by the Lighthouse Family. It flowed from the speakers, seeming to slide all over everything like a beautiful liquid. Surrounding us, holding us safe like a huge soft hand. I looked at them, Mike and Stevie reclining in their chairs in the angelic summer light floating through the windows, and I loved them. They were the best friends I’d ever had, more than friends, brothers, soul mates. I tapped two fags out of my packet with shaking fingers, threw one each to them and smiled. Sometime later, I can’t say for sure how long, the doorbell went. I found the idea of moving a difficult concept to get my head round at first, but when I tried it was easy. A little jerky at first, but then smooth and clear, as if all the creases had been ironed out of the world. It was Wild Thing. He took one look at the state of us and laughed so long and hard that there were actually tears creeping from the corners of his eyes and down his stubbly cheeks. The next few days are a chemical corrupted blur. Large parts of my memory of that weekend are missing altogether. It is as if the part of my brain responsible for recording what happened to the rest of my body had been left soaking in a bath of highly corrosive cleaning fluids, coming up shiny and smooth, the grooves and notches of memory burned away. The recollections I do have are not in chronological order and for the large part make no sense. I do know though that over the next two days we polished off the pills and possibly bought more. I remember at some point, I think it could have been early on Sunday morning, lying fully clothed in an empty bathtub, my mind cracked and reeling and believing I was about to die. I wanted a pen and a piece of paper to write a note to my parents to tell them how sorry I was, but I couldn't get out of the tub. I recall that very clearly, but after that nothing. Who the bathtub belonged to and how I eventually got out of it remains a mystery to this day. By Monday morning we were down to what Mike estimated to be our last quarter ounce of speed. We couldn't tell for sure because none of us still possessed the mental faculties to operate the digital scales in the kitchen. We sat, more fragile and damaged than we had ever in our entire lives been before, passing a bottle of Bacardi back and forth. The curtains were drawn, the only light coming from the shimmer of the TV screen. A video of Platoon. I get the feeling we had watched it more than once. It was that bit with Tracks of my tears by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. By two o'clock the last of the speed was gone. "Well that's it then isn't it," said Mike, his voice splintered sounding, broken. But when you've come this far it's not that easy. No longer are you keeping the forward motion rolling, now it's rolling you. It has gathered such terrible momentum that, not only are you unable to resist it, but the thought never even enters your head. We were locked into a tight, disintegrating, spiral. I can't remember exactly whose idea it was, but at exactly three fifteen PM on a Monday afternoon, we left the house to go mushie picking. There was a game of rugby going on in the park so we kept to the far side. The players in their red and blue shirts kept on staring over at us, stooped and shuffling with our plastic Tesco bag and our half-full bottle of Bacardi. Thinking about it now that was where I think I saw Dan for the first time. The pickings weren't great but we kept at it. Desperation is an unrelenting slave driver. We scanned the grass for over an hour, collecting our precious scraps of brown fungus. We ended up with a respectable bag full. My pulse was pounding in my neck as we walked home. There was a tight pressure in my chest and a sharp pain in my head. I wilted onto the sofa as soon as we got in the door, eyes closed, breathing sharply through clenched teeth. In a concerned voice Stevie asked if I was ok. I waved him away and sat with my head between my knees feeling faint. After a few minutes I felt a little better, not right exactly, but better at least. Normally, from a standing start so to speak, we would have laid the mushies carefully out on a sheet of newspaper and spent a while picking off the bits of moss and grass and throwing away those specimens which clearly weren't what we wanted. On this occasion however, Mike just dumped the whole contents of the bag straight into the bubbling brew pan. While Mike stood over the pan, slowly, patiently, working the foul smelling mass with a tattie masher, I emptied the contents of my pockets onto the coffee table. Two bashed up half finished packets of fags, three plastic lighters (none of which worked), about fifteen pounds in small change, numerous pieces of paper and a matchbox which turned out to contain one E and fifteen vallies. I looked expressionlessly at this for a while then shook the pill out onto the table and stuck the box containing the vallies back into my pocket. I selected a two pence piece from my pile of change, and taking great care to cup my hands round it so no little pieces would fly off, placed the coin on top of the pill and pushed down hard with my thumbs. I felt it give and grunted with satisfaction. I pulled a bankcard out of my wallet and with infinite care scraped the lumpy powder together. For the next ten minutes my concentration was focused to a zero point. Preparing the pill became my mission. By the time Mike came through with three steaming mugs of mushie brew I had produced the finest of fine powders. "Thanks." I said vaguely as Mike handed me a cup with ‘Boss’ written on it. I finished cutting my prize into three lines and looked up. Mike and Stevie were looking at me expectantly. I raised my cup. "Cheers." "Yeah," Mike added. "Bottoms up." We clinked our cups together and drank. I swallowed the warm, muddy tasting liquid in three gulps, gagging slightly on the second gulp, then snorted my line of pill. I handed the rolled up post-it-note to Stevie, wincing, involuntary spasms wracking my body. Filth upon filth upon filth. The Mushies came on extraordinarily quickly, probably because of the weakened state of our nervous systems. As soon as the first rising buzzing sensation began to take hold, I regretted what we'd done. The important thing is to control the panic. When you're tripping fear feeds off fear, let yourself freak out and you're done for. Outwardly you must remain calm, controlled, this is vital. Even if you feel like your head is folding in on itself you must never admit it. To do this will panic your companions (who are all feeling exactly the same) and give outward justification to their fear. The moment you all start freaking out about how fucked up you feel is the moment you have lost it. You will convince yourself that something really bad is about to happen. You will convince yourself that one of the mushies you threw into the brew pan was deadly poisonous or some shit like that. You will lose the plot completely and end up doing something really stupid like phoning an ambulance, or worse, your mum. Ride it out, weather the storm, that's the key. The first rush is always the worst. "Stevie," I said leaning forward on the sofa. "Something's wrong." I squeezed my eyes shut. "I feel really fucked up." Stevie looked back at me his eyes huge and frightened. He nodded, his face had gone very pale. Across the room Mike was holding his head in his hands, shaking it from side to side as if to rid his ears of water. I have no idea how many mushies went into that brew pan. Far too many. We were too far gone by that point to consider practicalities like the effects several hundred mushies would have on us. Our forward motion rolled us blindly into it like fish into a trawlers nets. It is impossible to describe freaking out on a trip. Many people have tried and for the most part failed. If you have first hand experience of overdoing it on magic mushrooms or acid then you will know what I mean without being told. Your understanding of this unfortunate state of affairs will not be enhanced by any fumbling descriptions of mine. All I will say is that things got much worse, very quickly. Mike was wildly pacing the room. I wanted to tell him to stop, chaotic movement makes a freakout worse. Stevie was curled into a foetal ball on the sofa talking to himself in an urgent whisper. We were losing it. Badly. So I did the only thing I could. I pulled the matchbox out of my pocket and handed out the vallies. Five apiece. We really had no other option. We waited for the effects in near desperation. Waiting for our chemical escape hatch from this warped hell to kick in and take us home. Eventually, after an eternity, the sticky blue darkness flowed up and closed over my head. It took me a very long time to work out what was wrong. The blackness came and went, washing up and down like surf on the beach of my consciousness. What I wondered mainly (when I was aware enough to wonder anything at all) was why my pillow was so fucking uncomfortable. This would trouble me for a short period of time, and then the shadowy waves would come again and it would cease to matter. Eventually I struggled into a sitting position. I had the distinct impression that I had not sat up at all. My nerves it seemed were telling my brain that my body was still leaning forward. Slumped over. Slumped over? Slumped over what? I looked down. A steering wheel. Slumped over a steering wheel. I licked my lips and swallowed while my sloth-like brain pondered this. My saliva tasted like copper and rotting fish. Mike was asleep in the seat next to me. Stevie was sprawled out in the back. I could see him in the rear view mirror. He was breathing heavily, there was a big spot on his cheek. The light was hard and flat, daybreak light. There were trees, dappled and leafy around me. Car? My head suggested doubtfully. Car. Rear view mirror, steering wheel, backseat. Yes, car! "Car," I said softly, in a voice borrowed from a ten-year wino. My car? I decided to get out and check. I got the door open ok but then got myself in all sorts of trouble because I'd forgotten to unbuckle my seatbelt. I eventually levered myself free and slammed the door. My body felt like a marionette with tangled strings. "My car," I croaked. I was pretty sure. I looked wildly about. We were in a wide gravel car park surrounded on all sides by beech trees. In one corner was a locked looking public toilet. There were two exits from the car park. A well tended but still tyre-rutted dirt track and a path which led uphill and into the trees. There was a sign, a white arrow on a tasteful green background, pointing to it. I stared long and hard at it. I stuck my hands in my pockets and found a fag with the filter half broken off and a single match. I pulled the filter right off and threw it away. I struck the match on the roof of the car and lit up, the first drag summoning up an old man's rattling cough from deep in my lungs. I looked at the sign again and then because of a lack of any other advice, followed it. The path wound up through the trees, it got steeper and spiralled round. I had to stop a couple of times before I got to the top. All at once I came out into a clearing, there were old looking paving stone/flag stone things beneath my feet. "What the fuck?" I muttered to myself. I was at the top of a considerable hill. Laid out before me was a town, not my town, not the town I had been perhaps hoping or expecting to see. It was of medium size and a river complete with rising wraiths of mist wound through it. Quiet, dead looking and eerie, it was sprawled out below me like a map. I could see a huge fucking castle on a hill just beyond the town about a mile distant. It just sat there not explaining itself, doing a bit of early morning looming. "Where the fuck am I?" I said to nobody in particular. I spun listlessly around on my heel and got such a heart-lurching shock that I actually screamed an embarrassingly girlie scream. There was a huge building behind me, a tower made of stone. Not particularly scary I know, but I hadn't realised it was there and when you are in a delicate state the last thing you need is fucking great buildings leaping out at you. When I had sufficiently recovered my wits I goggled up at it gape-mouthed. It stood over me huge and disapproving, a browny sandstone colour in the reflected dawn light. Half way up there was a statue of a man in armour with a sword. I took a few steps back and stood regarding it with a solemn frown. It looks a lot like the Wallace monument my brain chirped up, unasked. I shook my head. "It can't be," I said reasonably, " the Wallace monument's in Stirli….." Suddenly the thought dropped plop in the middle of my mind like a glob of unpleasant mucus. I whirled round, looking from the castle to the town and back to the tower again. "…In Stirling." I finished, a note of desperation in my voice. I looked back to the castle, Stirling castle, and then down at the town again. "Fuck," I said. My brain jabbered at me as I broke into a lumbering stagger-run. Stirling! Fucking Stirling! You drove more than half way across the country in a state of complete unconsciousness! "Shut up!" I shouted at my brain when the air rasping in my lungs would permit it. If you drove to fucking Stirling what the fuck else have you been doing? The police are probably looking for you right now for ram raiding that McDonalds or for knocking down that old woman. "What! What McDonalds? What old woman?" Ha! See! My point exactly. Look at you! You don't even know what day it is, do you! Do you? "Shut up!" All my life I will be glad that no one saw me running down that path. If some country cousin of the ugly dog walking people had come upon me, filthy, wild eyed and shouting at myself, then this book might well have been about my experiences of being in a lunatic asylum. A kind of ‘one got locked up in the cuckoo's nest for the rest of their natural life because they over did it with the mushrooms one fine afternoon’. I smashed my shin and then my elbow against trees on the way down that hill (both would later swell up in purple and yellow bruises of surprising size), but by that point I was beyond caring. I think I was yelling something unintelligible by the time I rounded the corner into the car park (scaring a small deer out of the bushes ahead of me as I went). I ripped the car door open and scrambled inside. As I turned the keys in the ignition the tape player erupted into life, Love Spreads by the Stone Roses exploded from the speakers, almost causing my eardrums to implode. I pawed helplessly at the controls but was unable to turn it off, or even down for that matter. I decided that if this was the price of getting out of this accursed car park then I would gladly pay it. I crunched the gear stick into reverse and slewed the car round backwards, gravel flying everywhere and jamming the car into first, floored it straight down the rutted track. Mike and Stevie were rattled awake and half out of their drug soaked wits by the car’s bone-shaking progress. I was out of the end of the road and heading north fast, one eye cocked to the rear-view mirror, in anticipation of the hordes of police cars I fully expected to materialise over the horizon at any second, before I even began to think about answering any of their questions. Mike has fallen asleep while we have been reminiscing. He is leaning back, mouth open, snoring slightly, with that ridiculous hat perched on his head. I consider finding something disgusting to put in his mouth but settle instead for using one of the black markers I habitually steal from work to obliterate the word 'with' from the front of his hat. As long as I live I don’t ever want to experience anything like The Lost Weekend again. We returned home to horrific comedown/hangover/nervous-breakdowns and empty bank accounts. The worst thing wasn’t that I'd completely wasted my holidays and had to go back to work feeling a million times worse than I'd left, or even in itself how bad I felt (although admittedly I didn't feel myself again for months). The worst thing was the nervous waiting, jumping every time the doorbell went or the phone rang, convinced that this time they would have finally tracked me down from the number plate and description given by the tearful victims of whatever heinous crimes I'd unconsciously (literally) committed. This huge nameless dread hung over me for a good three weeks. This feeling of the sword of Damocles suspended above me, hanging by an ever-fraying thread. But as the weeks wore on I slowly began to realise that nothing was going to happen, and I could breathe again. I firmly believe that we inflicted serious and lasting damage on ourselves that weekend, and have been adding to it incrementally ever since. Like a brain damage savings account. Start now and we'll guarantee the possibility of major strokes and early senile dementia in later life! At 0% apr. Step right up folks! We never made it to Amsterdam either. Mike wakes up after some good-natured prodding and accepts another drink. About fifteen minutes later The Discopistol staggers out of my bedroom and comes to a halt arms raised in the doorway. "Waaaaayyyy waaaaayyyy waaaaayyyy boozehounds!" He bellows. He takes several steps into the room, collapses and goes to sleep next to the heater. "Inconsiderate bastard," Mike says indignantly. "If he'd collapsed three feet closer we could have used him as a foot stool." It has just gone noon. It is strange to me to think that here I am drinking with Combat Mike and Stevie Dead on a Sunday eighteen years after Mrs Kempton told me on my first day of primary school that I would be sitting at a table with 'Steven' and 'Michael'. One of my most vivid memories of early childhood is of sitting at that grey table wide eyed and scared; and of the scruffy little boy called Michael, with the hair that would never lie flat no matter how much water he splashed on it, announcing in a clear, high voice: "Teacher is a fanny head!" I also remember the boy with the unruly curls sitting next to him turning round with an expression of the utmost amazement on his face and saying. "You can't say that, that's bad!" As if his view of the world had just been swivelled around by ninety degrees. "Yes," the boy called Michael continued, apparently doing an impression of a TV newsreader. "Teacher is a fanny head!" And then as if to punctuate the end of his sentence he hurled his rubber across the room. The boy with the curly hair and I watched its progress as it described a soaring arc across the brightly lit classroom, with the same O shaped mouths and Ooooooh noises which had hitherto only been reserved for bonfire-night fireworks. I remember how very pink I thought it looked. It struck a model of a wooden dinosaur on a high shelf on the opposite side of the classroom. The dinosaur wobbled for a second, seemed to be about to right itself, then came tumbling down catching the edge of the goldfish bowl on the shelf below, bringing bowl, water, gravel and 'Floor', the inexplicably named class goldfish, down with it. The bowl and its contents cascaded down on a table of girls who had the unfortunate luck to be sitting under the shelves. 'Floor' was twitching and leaping like an orange jack in the box in the middle of a rapidly spreading puddle. A little girl called Marsha Taylor (who ended up working the streets in a short skirt if the rumours are true) standing up on her chair in terror pointed and squealed. "Bad fish! Bad fish! Back in your cage!" I remember feeling hot tears prick my eyes as we stood before the teacher, Michael, Steven and me, looking down at the small soggy corpse on her desk. I remember wanting to cry but somehow knowing that I must not, knowing that was what the teacher wanted and expected. Knowing that if any one of us cried then somehow we would have lost. When the question came we looked at our feet, shuffled and kept our mouths shut. "Who threw it?" We didn't say a word. We all went home with notes pinned to our coats and my father gave me a pretty good hiding, a grim expression on his face as he bent me over his knee. I went tearful to bed that night my bottom throbbing and the words, It's for your own good, ringing in my ears. But the next day at school when I saw Mike and Stevie we shared a secret smirk with each other. We had endured and we had prevailed. Thinking about that now, drunk in this smelly living room, I feel a tug of deep and almost indescribable sadness. Could have been anything, that little kid, anything at all, but instead he became me. I used to want to be a fighter pilot. Just like Biggles in the books I used to read. I knew with a clear childlike confidence that before long I would be soaring into the sky in my Sopwith Camel, on my way to take on the enemy. Didn't matter that the First World War had been over for over sixty years, or that the only Sopwith Camel I was ever likely to see was in a museum. It didn't matter because I believed. Maybe that's what I'm mourning the most. The ability to believe in something you’re not supposed to. The ability to believe in something other than the next drink or the next pill. Stevie's question of last weekend comes floating up like a drowned corpse from deep water. Am I happy? Am I? By mid afternoon we are so saturated with alcohol that we almost squelch. In an incredible turn up for the books I thrash Stevie at Golden Eye three times in a row (10-3, 10-5 and 10-1 in case you're interested) and announce that I am the champion of the world. Stevie holds his head and groans. "You know it's only 'cause I'm drunk don’t you," he says, the words slightly slurred. I take advantage of his handicap to rack up another two victories before he goes in a good-natured sulk and refuses to play anymore. I challenge Mike to a game but he evades by capturing the moral high ground saying that he thinks it's antisocial and we should turn it off. I call him a chickenshit bastard and put some music on. When the doorbell goes around three I don’t hear it at first because me and Stevie are singing along to Sympathy for the Devil at the tops of our voices. I don’t know how long it had been going before I detected its faint, ping-pong, among the thundering bongo drums and Mick Jagger’s howling vocals. Wondering who it could be, I clawed my way out of my seat (knocking over an ashtray in the process) and wove off through the piles of rubbish to find out. Just before I open the door I have a funny little thought. Wouldn't it be really bad if this was a really good looking girl. What with you standing here, drink and fag in hand in the same clothes you went out in last night, unwashed and probably smelling like something that has just crawled out of a pond. Wouldn’t that be funny? Ha ha, I thought, ha ha. I opened the door. It was Cally. Fuck. "Eh, Hiya Cally, Dan's not here," I said with what was supposed to be a helpful friendly smile, but which in reality would probably have won me a prize in some kind of sleaze contest. "That's ok," she said. "I only need to pick up a few things." Shit, I thought, thinking of the state of the place. She raised her eyebrows slightly. "Well can I come in then?" "Oh yeah, yeah, cool," I said unblocking her way. "Having a bit of a party are we?" She said with a little smirk. Coldshowercoldshowercoldshowercoldshowe­r, I thought. "Yeah, you know," I said waving my hand to indicate the whole incriminating evidenceness of it all. She went through to Dan's bedroom and started throwing stuff into a bag. I looked at the chaos in the living room. Should I try a lightning cleaning frenzy before she sees it and rats me out to Dan? No, I decide. Fuck Dan, fuck Dan with a stick. A big stick, with nails on it. A big stick with nails an… "Oh my god," she says from the doorway. "This place is a mess!" I nod and drain my glass. I don't have to look behind me to know that Mike and Stevie are busily engaged in picking up their jaws from the floor. "Any chance of a drink?" she asks with an impish smile. Coldshowercoldshowercoldshowercoldshowe­rcoldshower. I find the Lambrini on the floor under a pile of beer cans. "This do?" "Yeah," she says. "I'll get a glass" "Um," I say. The kitchen looks like a filth bomb has gone off in it. "Or alternatively," she says coming back. "I'll just drink it out of the bottle." It takes us a little while to adjust to her presence. Her strange intrusion on our Super Sunday. She is a difficult sight to reconcile with the drunkenness and the filth, sitting cross-legged on the sofa in her baby blue Levi's sweater, all long dark hair and perfect complexion. But once it has registered her presence, the Super Sunday accepts her, absorbs her, just one more passenger, and rolls steadily on. What makes her being here so hard for us to deal with, is our conception that people like Cally and people like us are like social oil and water. If went to school in America then Cally would have been a cheerleader. We would have been…well I'm not entirely sure what we would have been. In school she was one of the 'it' girls, one of that exclusive clique of the schools best looking girls (although there is always one fairly ugly one who makes up for her lack of looks by being an absolute slut), whose sole purpose in life seems to be to wander the corridors chewing chewing gum and looking gorgeous. The kind of girl that every acne-ridden hormone crazed boy in the school obsesses about. 'It' girl sightings. 14 -18 School canteen flicking her hair. Walking slowly down the school corridor with her friends, perfectly aware that every boy she walks past is catching an eyeful of her arse. In the local pub where the barman fancies her and won't throw her out, despite the fact he knows full well she's only fifteen. On the arm and in the backseat of the car belonging to the older school 'celebrity'. The school ‘celebrity' is a kind of male version of the 'it' girl. He is usually good looking, rich, hard (or at least thinks he is) and a member of the school football team. The school 'celebrity' or 'wanker' for short, must not be confused with people like Dinnet. Dinnet is not a 'celebrity' he is a school 'nutter/hardman', people like Dinnet do not go out with the 'it' girls. They go out with the 'bad' girls, who are usually far scabbier and much bigger sluts. 18-25 Working as a secretary or a florist or at college. In the local pubs with her 'celebrity' boyfriend, who has now graduated to the status of 'town celebrity' and instead of playing for the school football team now plays for the crappy local team, and now thinks it is perfectly acceptable to go to Starski’s wearing his club blazer and tie. She sits there, soaking up the admiring gaze of her subjects. Truly she and her man are members of the town’s youth aristocracy. 25-30 Now married to the 'town celebrity' but losing her looks fast. Looking on bitterly from her seat by the bar as the next generation takes her place. Unaware that her joiner/town celebrity husband has already shagged half the town’s up and coming 'it' girls and has his beady eye on the other half. 30-45 Has ditched the 'celebrity' and has shacked up with a nice rich motor salesman. Has squeezed out a couple of kids, ruining what was left of her figure. Runs them to school while her husband screws his secretary. Now do you see hanging around in a stinking flat getting drunk with wasters on a Sunday afternoon anywhere in there? Nope, neither do I. I begin to sense that I may have to rethink my preconceptions about her. We go out for some food and a carry out about half-four just after the Discopistol has woken up, pale faced, vaguely waved his goodbyes and left. We buy enough booze to last us until we move down to the Wanchor for the traditional end to a Super Sunday, then we hit the chipper. Stevie and I go for black pudding suppers, Cally has a chip buttie and Mike much to everyone's disgust, goes for a battered Mars Bar and chips. Cally insists that we eat off plates and drags me through to the kitchen to wash some. I look at her out of the corner of my eye wrist deep in soap suds. "Cally?" "Mmm hmm?" she says turning to face me. Unlike some people, who will look away and not really listen, their mind half on something else when you talk to them, when you talk to Cally she gives you her full attention. "Can I ask you something?" She flaps her hands about to rid them of bubbles and hands me the last plate to dry. She wrinkles up her nose smiling. "Ok," she says. She looks you directly in the eye when you're talking to her, something I must admit I find a little disconcerting. "Why are yo…" I begin, then at the last minute bottle out and change what I was going to say. “I mean, are you coming to the pub later." She puts on an exaggerated southern belle accent, hooks an arm through mine and bats her eye lids at me. "Oh you just try and stop me." Coldshowercoldshowercoldshowercoldshowe­rcoldshowercoldshowercoldshowercoldshow­ercoldshower my brain gibbers. She laughs (something else she does a lot of) and leads me back through to the living room. Things have sort of gone back to normal. We eat our chips and watch some bizarre Sunday night gibberish on TV. We have adjusted to her and things are now basically the same as they were before her arrival. Except we have, by unspoken agreement, toned down some of the rudeness of our conversation. That and Stevie having a blushing fit the like of which I've never seen before, when, as he was telling his story about being chased by the weasel, she threw her arms around him, called him her poor baby and planted a big wet kiss on his cheek. Later, we head for the Wanchor, dog tired, stupid drunk and stumbling but, grimly determined to hold out. This was after all, the last lap. Andy and Wild Thing are in, propping up the bar. They both raise their eyebrows slightly when they see Cally, but don’t say anything. Wild Thing immediately starts trying to chat her up. I find that I feel strangely uncomfortable about this, a sharp little twist of jealousy jabs my side. I pull up short, pint half-way to my lips. Oh oh, I think, where the fuck is this coming from? Women like Wild Thing. This is something I’ve come to accept over the years, in the same way that I’ve come to accept that they don’t like me. It’s understandable. People like me do not do well in the scoring department, especially in small rural towns. It’s not just that though. Wild Thing exudes confidence, he knows how to talk to women. His body language says, hey, you’re the one doing the chasing not me; you’re the one chatting me up not the other way round, and it works like a fucking charm. Even if he was the one who initiated the conversation. Wild Thing has got the psychology of pulling down to a fine art. The thing is though, something extremely strange is happening here. Cally is not going for it. Not even in that mild, non-serious hair flicking way, that girls with boyfriends flirt with guys who aren’t their boyfriends. In fact, although she is being polite, she is pretty much ignoring him. In fact, she keeps turning back to talk to me. In my drunken state it is very difficult to work out what this means. As the only person she even vaguely knows she is probably using me as shelter from this lecherous drunk. But she seems really interested in what I’m saying and when we get a table she makes sure she sits next me. What the fuck, in short, is going on? What the fuck, in short am I thinking? A - she’s got a boyfriend, B – he’s my flat mate, C – we’re not even remotely in the same league, more than probably not even the same sport. She’s Champions League material, I’m Highland League material. Slowly, one by one, we succumb to the inevitable and slip away. With heads full of toxins and hearts full of dread at the coming of the week. Aware that another weekend has slipped through our fingers and that in some deep and fundamental way, we have blown it. Wild Thing is the first to go, it has to be said, looking a wee bit put out. Andy and Stevie go next, leaving half finished pints behind them. Mike, who has been steadily degenerating since we got here, is suddenly fading fast. His eyes lose their focus and his head begins to nod and drift inexorably downwards. He babbles something about going for a slash, and half knocking his chair over, gets shakily to his feet and totters off. When he doesn’t come back I decide that he has probably gone home. I make a mental note to take his jacket with me, then realise that in this kind of state my mental notes aren’t worth the mental paper they’re written on. I lean across the table and grab the jacket, folding it up on my lap. I realise with a start that it’s just me and Cally, left alone in a Sunday empty pub. “Looks like it’s just you and me,” she says. “Want a drink?” I find that I do. It’s not until Barry has begun to do all those ‘please leave my pub immediately’ things that barmen do when they are trying to get rid of you, that we decide it’s time to go. You know, subtle hints like turning off the TV, grumpily collecting glasses and looking at his watch every three seconds. There is frost in the air as we walk up the road. The stars are out, cold and hard high above, silver clouds move slow and ragged like watchful spectres. There are no cars on the roads tonight, the tar squats in the weird streetlight like a deep and lonely river. Cally punches me in the arm (which hurts more than I’d like to admit) when I start laughing at her because she’s got the hiccups. I laugh so hard in fact that I start hiccuping too. Then we both laugh until we’re doubled up and gasping. I have to admit that I didn’t really know Cally before today, except perhaps in a distant ‘hot girl in your year at school’ kind of way. It takes a fairly major re-think of my world to accommodate the idea that she’s a real person, who used to hide behind the sofa when the Wombles came on TV because she was terrified of them, or who once cut all her little sisters hair off because she wanted to be a hairdresser. If you’d told the spotty schoolkid with the bad haircut and the cheap clothes that all the other kids made fun of, that one day I would be walking home with the beautiful dark haired apparition I used to cast secret glances at in the corridors, I would have laughed and laughed, and secretly thought that it sounded just like heaven. We stop when we get to the end of my road and face each other. She stands looking up at me, head cocked to one side. “Thanks,” she says. “I haven’t had this much fun in ages.” She punches me in the arm again (but this time I don’t have to suppress a wince) “See you later.” “Yeah,” I say. “See you later.” I watch her as she walks away, until without looking back, she disappears around the corner.
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