Bebo

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	Chapter Six
	Saturday 3:09 am. Listen to this, I’ll tell you about the heartache. I’ll tell you bout the heartache and the loss of God. I’ll tell you about the hopeless night, the meagre food for souls forgot. Motorway cats eyes look beautiful at night. Floating, red, green and white, the borders of a ghost road in the darkness. I fumble in my pocket for another pill, keeping one hand on the wheel. I locate my Kinder Egg by touch and tap a Mitsu out into my cupped palm. I hold it under my tongue, feeling it burn but not really caring. I stick the empty Kinder Egg back into my pocket with my right hand, then swap hands on the wheel and with my left, feel on the passenger seat for the bottle of whisky. I have to brace it against the steering wheel to get the top off. The neck of the bottle clunks painfully against my teeth and the pill is washed away in one hot gulp. Burning doused by burning. I will tell you this man. No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn. I left the party about an hour ago. I felt like driving, being alone for a while, just me and the darkness. Out here on the perimeter there are no stars. The tape stops and with some difficulty I change sides. I take another peppery mouthful of Grouse, half of it running down my chin, and light a cigarette. The sudden flare from the lighter almost blinds me. Due to darkness and drugs my pupils don’t contract and my retinas are burnt by the sudden harsh glare. I curse, taking my foot off the accelerator as I try to blink away dancing blue after images. My teeth are chattering. A bad case of jaw rattle. I put my hand under my chin to stop it but as soon as I take it away it starts up again. The sound is like a pneumatic drill. I pull off the empty motorway, into this little roadside parking place. I turn off the lights and get out, leaving the door open and the engine running so I can still hear the music. I am staggering as I get out. I wonder what the fuck is in these pills. Heavy as fuck, probably ketamine or some shite. Doesn’t really matter though, because I’m going to neck them anyway. I throw up onto the tarmac beside the front wheel of my car. Thin, bitter, liquid sick with no substance. I remain on my hands and knees, gasping, for a few moments. I rinse my mouth out with whisky, which, I have to admit, tastes only marginally better than the sick, and shove half a packet of chewing gum in my mouth. I pick up my still burning cigarette from where I dropped it and prod it back between my lips. I lean back against the car, letting a cool breeze play on my face, feeling better. Feeling pretty fucking good in fact. Nothing like a good puke, I think. The parking place is screened from the road by a tall fringe of bushy trees. Directly across from me is a grassy area with a picnic bench. I go and stand on it. From here the ground slopes steeply away, giving you a panoramic view over the countryside. I look down at the town in the middle distance, like a neon cancer on the night. My home, my people, my life; where I belong. Cancel my subscription to the resurrection. But I don’t belong there. Don’t belong in the only life I’ve ever known. The only life I ever will know. Send my credentials to the house of detention. I get back in the car and drive. All our lives we sweat and save. Building for a shallow grave. I think about Noreen. I wonder what she’s doing tonight. Must be something else we say. Curled in a ball, crying her eyes out after her drunken husband beat the shit out of her for getting fired? Everything must be this way. Everything must be this way. I drive and drive on empty roads, no conception of where I’m going. What would happen if I just let go of this wheel? Would anyone miss me? My parents? I haven’t heard a word from either of them in six months. When they split from each other they split from me as well. I have become an unwelcome reminder, an uncomfortable intrusion into their new lives. Stevie and Mike? Yeah, well. Five to one baby, one in five. Do it. No one here gets out alive. I take my hands off the wheel. You get yours baby, I’ll get mine. The cats eyes float, a thousand points of tracer brilliance. Trading your hours for a handful of dimes. I take a swig from the bottle. Gonna make it baby if we try. Get together, one more time. Get together, one more time. I place my hands gently back on the wheel and smile a strange smile to myself. “Just testing,” I say. Get together, one more time. Get together, one more time. I turn the car back towards the first flickering gleam of dawn. Better get back, I think. The dunt from that last pill is beginning to fade. And besides, Mike is probably wondering what happened to his whisky. I light another cigarette, learn to forget. Learn to forget. Still one place to go. Still one place to go. This is the perfect place for a party. A big white walled farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. No life for miles around. There are three huge sheds, a big garden, trees and a wide open space of packed dirt in front of the house to park in. As I bring the car to a gentle halt, I notice that there are at least half a dozen other cars, parked at drunken angles. The music is loud, an indeterminate, thud-thud-thud, muffled by thick granite walls. There are a few people outside the front door, smoking a joint and gazing up at the creeping dawn. They say, Alright, and How’s it going, all sincere voices and saucer eyes. “Not bad,” I reply. “Not bad.” Inside, chaos reigns. The music sort of resolves itself as I step through the front door. The fuzzy beat comes into focus. The effect is like stepping into a huge speaker cabinet. The second I step through the door I am almost decapitated by a Frisbee. “Oh fuck, sorry!” says a big red haired guy at the other end of the hallway. “Don’t worry about it,” I say, then a thought strikes me. “Don’t suppose you’ve seen Stevie Dead anywhere?” “Who?” he says, and then. “Aye, fucking hold on a minute,” directed at the mashed cunt at the other end of the hallway who is jigging up and down impatiently, eager to return the Frisbee. “Steve Docharty?” I ask. “Aw, right,” his face splits into a fucked smile of comprehension. “Fuck knows like, I think he was in the living room.” I thank the guy and head through to the living room, witnessing the Frisbee catch him a cracker on the forehead in the process. The living room is packed. People are everywhere, crammed onto every available surface which can be made to serve as a seat. Those who were not fortunate enough to bag a place on the sofa/edge of a coffee table/heater, are lying on the floor. There is a porno playing on the television. Two big hairy men with moustaches and mullets spit-roasting a tiny blonde woman. In my semi deranged state I find this image deeply disturbing. Between the music, I now recognise the CD as Darren Emmerson, Global Underground, and everybody shouting at the top of their lungs, I am unable to ask if anybody has seen Stevie or Mike. Out of the living room window I can see someone driving around on one of those ride on lawn mowers. Someone is chasing them, kicking a football at their head and waving a can of beer. When I eventually find Stevie he is in the kitchen, finishing off a mug of mushie brew. He raises his eyebrows as I enter. “Alright?” he says. “Alright,” I say. The owner of the house is also in the room. He is eating the slippery black mess of mushies from the bottom of the brew pan. He looks up from forking the foul smelling gunk into his mouth. “Alright Craig,” I say, “how’s it going?” “Pretty fucking cool like, pretty mashed,” he says, magic mushrooms dangling out of his mouth like decaying earthworms. I get my fags out and offer him one, feeling that I should make some gesture of acknowledgement for being in his house. “Aw, cheers!” he says and hugs me. “Sound as fuck like!” I sit down at the kitchen table, opposite Stevie. “So where did you get the mushies from?” I ask. “Mike and some boy went picking by torchlight, got back half an hour ago.” I laugh. “Where is the stupid cunt?” Stevie puts his hands behind his head and leans back, stretching, two legs of his chair off the floor. “Last time I saw him,” he says. “He was in the field with the horse.” This is typical. Hallucinogenic drugs do this to him. This is kind of like the time he decided he decided he wanted to be at one with the countryside and fell down a big muddy hole. I have always been darkly suspicious that he was responsible for the whole Stirling episode. “Anyway,” Stevie says. “Where the fuck have you been?” He looks up at the clock on the wall, the hands say five o’clock. I shrug. “Just felt like a drive,” I say. I can see in his eyes that he wants to say something else, but he picks up on the tone in my voice which tells him to leave it. We have, however, known each other too long for him not to twig on that something is wrong. He offers me the dregs of his mug instead. “All the mushies are gone,” he says. “We could go picking for some more if you want, it’ll be light pretty soon.” I gently press the cup back into his hand. “Nah, you finish it. Wouldn’t mind another pill though.” “Mike’s still got some, if you can find him.” He pulls a twenty out of his pocket. “Get us a couple, if you do,” he says. I nod and duck out of the kitchen, out of the front door and across to the sheds, stopping only to collect the whisky from the passenger seat of my car. Mike, when I find him, is covered in shit and has been bitten by a horse. He materialises out of the darkness beside the cowshed talking complete bollocks. “Mike!” I shout. He looks around wildly, taking a few seconds to identify the source of the noise. He seems to be having trouble focusing. “Alright,” he says, through clenched teeth, his jaw projecting from his face as if it were trying to escape. He has removed one of his socks and put it over his right hand as a makeshift bandage, a little blood seeps through the dirty material. “What the fuck happened to your hand?” I ask. He sucks in a deep breath and closes one eye, his head wobbles from side to as he exhales, as if trying to focus on me with his one available peeper. “This fucking horse,” he says. “Big brown fucker. I was just trying to feed the fucking bastard and the thing reared up and bit me. Started running around in circles kicking its back legs up, so I fucking legged it.” He looks down at his mud streaked clothes. “Fell in a bit of a puddle,” he announces. “Got any pills left?” I ask. For a moment he looks at me like he has no idea what I’m talking about. Then his brow creases in concentration. “Um, no, waitwaitwait, I mean yes.” He starts rummaging in his right hand pocket with his left hand (the one which has not suffered a horse attack), reaching awkwardly across his body. I see what will be the probable result of this. I have no desire to spend the next fifteen minutes raking around in the mud for Mike’s lost pills. To avert disaster, I grab his arm and drag him into the cowshed where there are lights on. There are people in the cowshed. The bit where we are is raised above the rest of the shed. A walkway/viewing gallery, kind of like they have in swimming pools. From here we can see the whole of the shed. It is a high roofed building, lit by a string of bare bulbs strung from rafter to rafter. Most of it is given over to the cows. A wide floor space lined with straw and shit. At the front of this space a little piece of the shed had been sectioned off with metal railings of the kind used to make gates. There was also a large metal trough. Two people were running about in the cow pen, knee deep in shit, apparently trying to catch a cow. Two others were busily engaged in filling the trough with bags of cattle feed, dragged from the pile near the door. Already it was overflowing with more than the cows could eat in a month. A fifth was bare chested, sweat running down his back, hurling forkfuls of hay from a half-demolished bale over the fence. They shouted and waved to us from their cloud of drug induced insanity. Finally after a lot of grimacing and stiff-armed pocket hunting, he produces a plastic bank bag. A few whole pills are in evidence but for the most part the bag is filled with broken halves and quarters and a large quantity of lumpy white powder. He manages to fish out two whole ones and I hand him a tenner. He pulls out a half for himself and I give him the bottle of whisky. “Fuck,” he says, “I’ve been looking for this. “You need to save some for Stevie.” I say, as he forces the bag back into his pocket probably crushing the rest of them in the process. “Do you know what I’ve been thinking about since I was attacked by that horse?” he says, gesticulating with the hand with the sock on it. “What?” I say evenly. “The universe,” he says. “Being attacked by a horse made you think about the universe?” “No,” he says, waggling his sock at me, a serious expression on his face. “The horse is incidental.” I take the bottle of whisky away from him. He sways slightly. “So what about it?” “What about what?” I sigh and try to be as patient as my pill-fried brain will allow. “The universe.” He points out the door at the sky. The air outside has taken on a distinctly grey sheen, old man morning is on his way and there is nothing we can do about it. Fuck, I think, fuck. “Doesn’t it bother you that no one knows what the fuck it is?” He leans one hand against the wall, undoes his fly and begins pissing, looking back over his shoulder, still talking. “Doesn’t it bother you that we’re sitting on a rock in the middle of fuck knows where?” “Mike.” “With nothing for a billion, billion miles in any direction except a boiling soup of hydrogen and shit. I mean, for fuck sake, what is going on. I really hope some cunt knows.” “Mike.” “And the whole of human experience, every war ever fought, every book ever written, ever stupid, pointless discovery we’ve ever made, everything we ever mistakenly attached importance to, will mean nothing the day some random comet comes screaming out of the sky.” “Mike.” “It won’t have any conception, any thoughts of what it’s destroying. Just a blind interplay of forces coming at a ga-zillion miles an hour. Nothing personal planet earth. Nothing personal.” “Mike.” “What?” “You’re pissing on your shoes.” Only the desperate remain. The numbers whittled down to those who really have no place else to go. No place but here. A darkened room, curtains tightly drawn in a hopeless last stand against the dawn. There are about ten of us left, chemical cripples in a room lit only by the flickering light from the television. Somebody has a bucket on the go. When they draw the bottle up out of the water the smoke catches the TV light and dances with primary colours. I watch Craig, the owner of the house, sink the bucket. He does it too fast and collapses on his knees, a single strand of saliva connecting his face to the carpet, coughing hard. Deep tearing coughs, right from the bottom of his chest, like the tissue of his lungs is being ripped open. I watch him. He wheezes for a while, then drags himself back to sit against the wall. The expression on his face is not good. The bucket on top of the mushies, on top of the pills. The expression on his face reminds me of the way this guy Jamie Walker looked the first time he took mushies. We were about fourteen, up in this play park tripping out of our faces. Jamie was one of these stupid cunts who tried to impress people by the amount of drugs he could take. He just kept dipping into the bag, shoving handful after handful into his mouth, talking all hard. Then, all of a sudden, he was just sitting there, still and quiet. He sat like that for a couple of minutes. Then someone gave him a wedgie. I can’t remember who did it, but I’m sure it was meant as a joke, a light-hearted prank to snap him out of his daze. I’m sure whoever did it was not expecting the response they got. For one sudden split second, his eyes were the size of saucers. Then he started screaming, leapt to his feet, pulled off one of his shoes, and sticking it in his mouth fled across the park. The expression on his face just before he got wedgied was exactly the same as the expression on Craig’s face right now. I look around the room. The Discopistol is collapsed in an armchair. He writhes and buckles, pulling his head from side to side, the drink and the pills doing a number on his nervous system. His eyes roll and his mouth flops open and closed. Occasionally he sits bolt upright and talks to people who aren’t there. Random neurones fire in his brain, synapses spasm and crackle like a badly wired electrical system. Stevie is squeezed up next to me on the sofa. He is pale and sweaty, bug-eyed and snake jawed, but he looks reasonably aware and sane. Next to him Mike is in a similar state to The Discopistol. Beyond him is a girl called Suzie, who is swigging from a bottle of cheap white wine and asking every five minutes if anybody has any more coke. Suzie is the only realistically available girl left at the party, which means all the guys in the room are trying to get into her pants with a toxin soaked desperation that is unlikely to succeed. Suzie, it must be said, is a bit of a minger, but due to the laws of supply and demand her stock has skyrocketed, elevating her to the status of a supermodel. Wild Thing has been perched on the arm of the sofa for the last hour, chatting her up with an intensity which is actually pretty depressing. Every time someone else tries to get a word in edge ways he cuts them off, staking his claim. Suzie is not biting however, making him chase, milking the situation for all it is worth. People are littered all over the room, so fucked it’s scary. It’s one of those situations where you could see someone going to sleep and never waking up again. I take a swig from the can of Tennents in my hand and wonder if anyone has any more pills. Forward motion; a force as powerful and undeniable as gravity. Probably not, I decide. At least not for sale. At this stage in the proceedings drugs become a carefully hoarded commodity, almost as valuable as sex. Mike is mumbling, badfishbadfishbadfish, over and over again to himself. Stevie is looking at him. When he notices me looking too, he nods towards the gibbering form. “Check the state of that,” he says. “Him and Craig picked fucking heaps of mushies.” “How come you’re ok?” “Because they sneaked off and took the lot between the two of them. By the time I got there there was only half a cup left.” “Getting anything off them?” “Nah, fuck all. Well, maybe for a bit.” We sit in silence for a little while, staring at the TV, trying to make sense of the doings of the Teletubbies. And then with out even knowing I was going to do it, I ask him. “Stevie?” “Mmm-hmm.” “You remember when you asked me if I was happy?” He looks at me, eyebrows raised in surprise. “Yeah.” “What did you mean?” He shakes his head and creases up his brow. He is not refusing to answer my question, he just needs a moment to think. “I dunno,” he says, looking at me carefully. “I suppose I was asking myself as much as you.” I say nothing and after a moment he continues. “I mean, this is it isn’t it? This is my life, our lives. I mean, the details may change a little over the years, stop taking drugs, get a mortgage, have some kids, but basically this is it.” “More bars on the cage,” I say, so quietly that only I hear it. “What?” “Nothing,” I say. “Go on.” “This job or one like it, this place, these streets, these people. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I’m twenty four years old next year and I’ve got my whole life ahead of me, and that’s the problem. I can see it all, every fucking minute of it so clearly I might have lived it already. I don’t know, I just thought there would be something else,” he exhales and looks at me again to see if I’m understanding any of this. “Fuck knows,” he finishes lamely. “I just thought it would be different, that’s all.” We are a generation without an identity. We are a generation with nothing to define us, inside and out we have no sense of ourselves. We cannot affect the world around us. We have no cause greater than apathy. Mike tugs Stevie’s sleeve and whispers in his ear. After a moment Stevie leans over and rolls his eyes in the direction of the door. I know right away what is going on. Such furtive behaviour at this point in the morning only ever means one thing. We go through to the deserted kitchen and Mike pulls the plastic bank bag out of his pocket. “Ahhhhhhhh,” I say, suddenly understanding. I’d thought it was strange that he’d had any pills left but when he produces the bag it all becomes clear. There are no pills left. What remains is the crushed up bits and crumbly white powder in the bottom of the bag. Stevie takes the bag from Mike, who is too incapable to make much headway, and empties its contents onto the kitchen table. He sets about the chunky powder with a desert spoon. Crushing and smoothing until he has produced a fine white powder. He takes a bankcard from his pocket and cuts out three lines. They look ominous and alien, white and man made on the surface of the stripped pine table. Nothing burns like snorting a crushed up pill. Chemical fire, hot and rank in your nose and throat. When I was done I dabbed up the dregs with a finger and rubbed them on my gums, something you’re supposed to do with coke. Does it work with pills? I don’t know and frankly, I don’t really care. I take a long drink of water from the tap. We go for a walk outside. It is a clear, blue-skied morning. A crisp breeze wanders aimlessly around the farmyard looking for things to play with. From the barn, overfed and recently terrified cattle moo uneasily. On the roof of the farmhouse birds chirrup and burble, seeming to laugh at us. In the distance I can see a figure who seems to be carrying a gun. I squint my raw eyes against the unaccustomed light. I identify him as one of the cow feeding people from earlier. Apparently he has found an air rifle from somewhere and is hunting small birds. He waves at us and I return the gesture eyeing the gun warily. Drugged up morons and firearms are not the world’s greatest combination. We make our way back inside as the lines of pill begin to kick in. Forward motion; that which comes down must go up again. My watch says nine-seventeen. The living room is as we left it, with one notable exception. Wild Thing and Suzie have disappeared. After about half an hour I realise I am not getting much of a dunt off of this pill. In fact, apart from halting the comedown, it really has achieved fuck all. I ask Mike if he has any of that whisky left but he only shakes his head grimly. I concentrate instead on the can of beer in front of me, the last there is. Ten minutes later the first twinges of desperation have begun to appear on the horizon. My eyes light on the bucket. “Someone brew us a bucket,” I croak to the room at large. This guy I don’t know crawls over to the pail of water and pulls a brew, creamy green and opaque, phantom marble, nebulous and gently moving like ghosts. He raises the bottle slowly out of its bucket of water, a nest of burning dope in the dip of tinfoil on the bottles neck. He carefully removes the improvised tinfoil gauze and sets it aside. He waits until he is sure I have got a good hold before he takes his hands off the bottle. I take a deep breath to prepare myself and then exhale, puffing my cheeks out and blowing all the air out of my lungs. I kneel and place my mouth on the neck of the bottle like a prostitute delivering fellatio and sink it, hard and fast, one decisive downward movement which fills my lungs with smoke; the way it should be done. I just about manage to contain the coughing. If you start coughing after you sink a bucket you’re fucked. You won’t ever stop. When I’ve got my shit together again I haul myself back onto the sofa. I smoke a fag but after the bucket it’s like smoking nothing. As the minutes pass I notice that I am becoming more and more uncomfortable. I seem to have forgotten how to manipulate my limbs properly. I feel tangled, knotted. My brain seems to be heating up, becoming hot and confused. I am finding it difficult to understand what people are saying. I can hear the words well enough but finding the associations which should go with them seems to be beyond me. And all the time my brain is getting hotter and hotter. Cooking in chemicals. Without really being aware that I am doing it, I begin to roll my head from side to side. Flopping from shoulder to shoulder like all the bones in my neck have dissolved. From time to time I will notice myself doing it, have a sort of sudden jolt back to reality, and make myself stop. It is during one of these sudden jolts that I realise I have been listening to someone talking. As I pull myself back to the here and now I realise they have stopped abruptly. I wished that they would finish what they had been saying. Somehow that seemed to be important. “Go on, finish what you were going to say,” I mumble. I raise my head and open my eyes, and everybody in the room is staring at me. This guy directly opposite me has paused with a joint half way to his mouth. As I watch a bomber drops to land, unheeded, on his lap. I realise that all this time it has been me talking. I think it’s time for me to go to bed. I fall off the chair and onto the floor. Stevie helps me to my feet and tries to take my arm but I wave him away. I fumble to the door like someone with their shoelaces tied together and slide through, holding onto the doorframe for support. I crawl up the stairs and onto the second floor. My hands seem far away, stuck on the end of six-foot poles. I drag myself upright with the aid of a banister and slump against the door nearest to me. With the hand which is not holding me up, I fumble for the door handle. Wild Thing and Suzie are in there, naked on the bed. “Alright.” Wild Thing waves cheerily. “Want to join in?” “Shut the fucking door, you fucking…” Suzie screams as I slam the door on the last word of her sentence. I push my way through the next door down, not really caring if there is anybody in there. I pull the curtains, almost hauling them down in the process and, still wearing all my clothes and my shoes, get into bed. After some thrashing around I find I have become hopelessly entangled in the duvet and, remembering the old adage about being trapped in quick sand, the one which says, the more you struggle the worse your situation will become, I lie still and pull a pillow over my head. I wake up. Everything is very quiet and still, except for my breathing which is loud and ragged. There is something wrong. Badly wrong. Although I have woken up I can’t make my body move. I lie still for a long moment. Am I dreaming? I strain to try and open my eyes, sit up, anything. I can’t. It’s like people are holding me down. With this thought comes the first real fear. That quick icy thrust that comes with the sudden realisation that there may be something badly wrong with you. I stop trying to move, my brain racing. What the fuck is this? Have I had a stroke or some shit? It is like the connection between my body and brain has been severed. Is this a coma? Am I paralysed? What if I can never move again? This thought scares me so much I redouble my efforts. I heave and heave, and then suddenly I can move. I sit up gasping, my movements jerky and robot-like. For the next minute or so I just sit there, rubbing my arms and flexing the muscles in my legs. Eventually I lie down again, but I don’t lie still, every few seconds I shift position, as if afraid that immobility will cause a resumption of that frozen state. I lie wide eyed listening to people moving around in the house below me. It feels as if a low-level electrical current is being passed through my body. A sound wave being pumped into my head, making my bones gently vibrate. A sheet of white noise buzzing between every cell in my body. Eventually I fall asleep again. About three hours later Mike wakes me up by holding a bottle of poppers under my nose. “Gah!” I shout. “Gah! Mike you fucking cunt!” “Get out of bed,” he snaps impatiently. “You’re wasting your life asleep.” I drag my self to my feet with the aid of Mike’s outstretched hand and look around for my shoes, which I must have kicked off in the night. “What time is it?” I ask. “Four,” he replies. “Fucking hell.” My voice is a horse croak of corroded vocal chords as I pull on my trainers and lace them up. I note without much surprise that my feet stink. “Me and Stevie are going to get a carryout in a bit. Want to come?” I rub my eyes with balled fists to clear my head. “Ok,” I say. “But only if I can have another blast of those poppers.” He hands me the bottle. “Good clean fun for all the family.” he observes as I remove the cap. We stop at the bank in the high street so I can take out another big chunk of my wages. I notice with annoyance that there is yet another fag burn in the sleeve of my Firetrap jacket. We go to Tesco and weave our unsteady way towards the drink aisle through belligerent crowds of Saturday afternoon shoppers. We stand in awe before monolithic shelves, stacked high with alcohol from across the globe. A United Nations of intoxicants. Vodka from Russia, whisky from Scotland and Ireland, Bourbon from America, Tequila from Mexico, gin from England, rum from the Caribbean, brandy from France and pernod from fuck knows where. All coming together in their inalienable right to drink themselves to death. Under the democratic freedom to promote alcoholism, insanity and liver failure. We have everybody’s money. Everyone is counting on us to make a good decision. A smooth start to the evening depends on us keeping our heads and making the right choices now. We come to the conclusion that in such circumstances, quantity is definitely more important than quality, and so we load our trolley up with cheap lager and wheel it to the check out. I start to feel truly awful standing in the queue. Sweat starts to trickle down my spine beneath my clothes. Everything seems to be pressing in on me. There is too much going on around us. Crowds of fat women and bald men pushing trolleys. Screaming snotty nosed children with screwed up eyes and chocolate around their mouths, wailing their selfish misery into the general supermarket roar. Old people with shock-white hair, skin loose and hanging, shuffling like zombies, the grey pallor of impending death swimming in their eyes. A carnival of chaos moving around us, punctuated by the spiked rattle of trolley wheels, and overseen by fat ginger checkout girls and camp, shirt and tie managers. An orgy of confusion, closing like a fist. I am very glad to be out of there. The beginnings of darkness lace the air as we load the booze, crate after crate of it, into the boot of Mike’s car. The air is cold and fresh as only country air can be. I feel like I can breathe again. We clamber into the car and Stevie sticks his Rolling Stones tape into the deck. Sympathy for the Devil is the first song and he cranks it right up. As we pull away from the last houses and into the countryside Mike puts his foot to the floor. I watch the needle on the speedometer climb steadily from fifty, through sixty, seventy, eighty, to hover around ninety. We close fast on another car, a silver Mercedes driven by an old couple, and without even touching the brakes Mike is past them, dropping into third for the extra power, the engine screaming, overtaking into a blind corner. They recede quickly behind us, their faces two white blobs crowned with grey, the driver shaking his head at us. I look at Stevie’s hand, it is gripping the front of his seat, the knuckles white. I look down at my own hand, it is doing something similar. Mike drives too fast. It scares the hell out of both me and Stevie but neither of us will say anything. I think it scares Mike too. Maybe he does it to prove a point. Because he’s not supposed to? To show that he can be in control of something? That if nothing else he can elect to drive recklessly fast and take the consequences. His control the only thing standing between him and disaster. Does he do it to have control over something in his life, when he has control over so little else? Does it make him feel alive? Or does he just do it? Does it matter? No, I don’t suppose it does. We arrive back at what Mike has dubbed, The Farm of The Doomed, at around ten past five. We clink-clink our way to the kitchen, staggering under the weight of two crates each, and clatter them down on the table. Those who have survived the night emerge and help themselves to a beer. Salvation has arrived. Apparently for the second time that day. A few of those helping themselves from the crates on the table are clearly mashed off their tits. “Fuck sake,” I whine. “Where are the pills coming from?” “Maggie came up,” Wild Thing informs me in-between swigs. “Shite, any spare?” “Nah,” he says, scratching his chin. “All gone, we bought the lot. He said it’s been a bumper weekend.” “Fuuuuuuuck!” I moan. Panic, real and desperate, has surfaced in my chest. Panic, and I don’t know where it’s coming from. And I’m a fucking liar. Lying to you and to myself. Because I know exactly where it’s coming from. I’ve been left out in the cold. Everybody has pills except me, and the most readily available source is sold out. And if it has been a bumper weekend in the pill business, then they are going to be pretty thin on the ground elsewhere. This panic is coming from the prospect of grubbing around The Wanchor and Starski’s in a desperate search for pills which will only serve to confirm what I already know. The party has shut its doors on me, there are no more pills. When pills are in such short supply nobody will sell any from their own stash. There’s no point in even asking. The prospect of a night without pills is not so bad if everybody is in the same boat. But when it’s just you, watching everybody else getting mashed, it’s enough to drive you crazy. I grab a beer and head through to the Living room to find Stevie. “Hey Stevie, did you see Maggie earlier?” He blinks. “Uh, yeah.” “Did you get pills off him?” “Yeah,” he answers slowly. “Me and Mike both did.” I exhale in exasperation, raising my arms and looking to the heavens (or at least the ceiling). “Well that’s just fucking great,” I breathe. When I look at him again he is laughing. He takes my right hand with his left and holds it out in front of him. With the other he reaches into his pocket and drops five pills into my cupped palm. “Who’s your pal?” he asks. “Aw, fuck, cheers,” I say, slipping him a few notes. He gives me a tight little smile, slaps me on the shoulder and asks where all the fucking beer has gone. After two drinks I feel a little better. Two more sort me out completely. My comedown is buried, varnished over by a thin lacquer of alcohol. Frozen in place until the alcohol bath defrosts and sets it free. We sit in the living room with Leftfield booming out of the stereo, watching the football scores on the evening news and arguing over the plan for the evening. Motherwell – 1 Celtic –3 “I can’t be arsed with the Wanchor. It’ll just be as shite as it is every weekend.” Dunfermline – 0 Inverness Caledonian Thistle – 0 “What the fuck do you want to do then you anti-social cunt? Sit here until it’s time to go to Starski’s?” Dundee – 1 Hibs – 1 “What’s the fucking point in going down to the Wanchor and buying drinks when we’ve got a shit load sitting here? Think about it.” Hearts – 2 Rangers – 1 “Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeessssss­sssssss!” Dundee Utd – 4 Aberdeen – 0 “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck­!” Livingston – 1 Kilmarnock – 1 “Shut the fuck up, you fucking cheapskate.” And that concludes today’s results from the Bank of Scotland SPL. “Smell yer ma.” And now for all the action from Bells Division One. And so on, and so on. By eight o’clock I am ready to go. Sitting in this smelly living room has gotten old pretty fast. I want to change the backcloth, to be somewhere else, anywhere that isn’t here. I make repeated attempts to get people moving but most of them are mashed by now and trying to get mashed people to do anything is like trying to herd cats. In fact some of them seem to have got into that rolling eyes, grinding jaws, gouch on the couch mode which makes the chances of them going anywhere or doing anything, at best, unlikely. I lean over and shout in Stevie’s ear. “Want to get going?” “Aye,” he yells back. “I’ll get Mike.” I down the remains of my beer and open another one as Stevie pulls himself off the sofa. I want to get as drunk as possible on the free booze here before we go to the Wanchor. With this thought in mind I downed half the bottle in one long swallow. Stevie returned five minutes later and gave me the nod. “Taxi?” I asked. “Nah,” he replied. “Mike says he’ll drive.” With a shrug I grabbed Wild Thing, who was looking bored, and the Discopistol, who was looking incoherent, and led them through the hallway and out the front door to where Mike was waiting impatiently in the driver’s seat. We clambered in, cursing and spilling beer. When we were all seated and reasonably sure that no one had forgotten anything important, Mike released the handbrake and stepped on the accelerator. As we pull out of the farm track and onto the main road I turn on the radio. I twist the dial until, something familiar jumps at me from the idiot clamour of static. “Fzzzzzzzrzzzzzzz...When I hold you baaaaaaaaby.” Stevie, Mike and I simultaneously jolt upright in our seats. “In a state of ecstasy.” We look at each other, grinning like fools. “I wanna stay in your arms forever.” This song, En-trance, set you free, was playing at the third year school disco, the first time we took a pill. The DJ played it at the exact moment all three of us came up for the very first time. This is a sign, so glaringly obvious that none of us even has to say it. “Oooooooooonly love can set you free!” So we do what has to be done. After all, you can’t fight fate. I pass my beer around and turn it up, loud. “Set you freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee­! Set you freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee­eeee!” Mike plants the foot, we’re all laughing and singing along at the tops of our voices. It’s Saturday night and the world has just swum back into focus. When the song has finished and we have pulled ourselves out of our gooey puddle of nostalgia, we notice the police car, right behind us. “Oh fuck!” Mike breathes. “Nobody look but there’s a pig car right up our arse.” There is a sudden stab of fear in the car, you can feel it in the air, like electricity. In a situation like this there are certain things you should, and shouldn’t do. The situation is akin to a man swimming in the sea who suddenly sees a circling fin. The first rule is don’t look round. If the pigs see a car full of heads suddenly crane round to look at them, they begin to think there is something up. If you have to look at them, use the mirrors. I glance in the side mirror and there it is. A squat black shape behind a pair of glaring headlights. The tell tale black rectangle on the roof the only thing to give away its true identity. The second rule is, don’t panic. Even if you have drugs on you, which we all do. Like the man with the shark, thrashing about attracts unwanted attention. The cops see people scrabbling about trying to fish their drugs out of their pockets, they will pull you over for sure. Slowly, nonchalantly, with my left hand, I ease the window halfway down, while my right gently pops my kinder egg out of my pocket. If they flash us, this thing is going out of the window and into the roadside undergrowth just as hard as I can sling it. Mike has eased off the accelerator. He knows he was speeding, but if the cops haven’t noticed, a sudden glare of brake lights will draw their attention to it nicely. Mike knows better than to slam on the brakes with a cop car so close behind. He, after all, has most to lose here. Not only has he got drugs on him, but he is also over the speed limit and very definitely over the drink drive limit. I turn off the radio and a tense silence fills the car. The pig car just sits there, keeping a constant distance behind. The first streetlights of the town are visible ahead. “Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off!” Mike hisses through clenched teeth. The faces in the rear view mirror look pale and strained. We are getting close to the first streetlights when the pursuing car begins to close with us. “Oh fuck here we go!” I say and my right arm tenses. Without warning we are out of the darkness and into the artificial street-lit luminescence. And suddenly Mike is laughing. I look at him as if he has gone mad. “What the fuck are you laughing at!” I shout. “Look,” he gasps between helpless bursts of giggling. “Look!” I look, and then I am laughing too. The others look at me in dazed incomprehension. “Taxi,” I breathe. “It’s a fucking taxi.” They look blankly at me for a few moments, and then they are laughing too. Mike ditches his car in a back street and we walk, through a little lane, onto the high street and towards the Wanchor. We stop at a bank machine so everybody can get money. I look around, breathing in the aroma of the chip shops, greasy on the cold night air. Saturday night is just getting into full swing. Groups of guys in checked shirts or Fred Perry jumpers, groups of girls in strappy shoes and skimpy tops, coming and going between pubs, cash machines and fast food places. There are loads of kids about too. too young to get into the pub, they hang around the high street, trying to get someone to buy them a bottle of White Lightning or MD 20/20, which they will take up to the park or the school, drink and vomit into a bush. I shake my head in wonder, it doesn’t seem like long ago I was in exactly that position. I light a fag, feeling a little homesick for a place I could never revisit, and watch a boy of about thirteen suddenly and unexpectedly throw up against a wall. A couple of his friends stand around, laughing and pointing. One of them kicks him in the arse. Another who has been throwing surreptitious glances in my direction, comes nervously towards me. When he talks he uses my name. I look round at him in surprise. “Eh…got any pills?” “No,” I say. “Fuck off.” He walks quickly away, red faced, his ears burning. Jesus fucking Christ, I think. He looked about eleven! And how the fuck does he know who I am? This sets off a minor panic attack. If an eleven year old kid on the street knows me, and knows I might have pills, then who the fuck else knows? What’s to stop the coppers busting me as I walk out the door of the Wanchor tonight? After a second I begin to calm down. I take comfort in the thought that the average eleven year old knows far more about the mechanics of the small town drug trade than the thirty-five year old drug squad officers who have been assigned to stop it. And anyway, these days it’s hardly worth the D.S.’s time to bust you with five pills. A couple of years ago a friend of mine got a year for twenty pills, today you could probably get away with claiming that was personal. They might fine you, but they probably wouldn’t lock you up. If they locked up every cunt they caught with ten or twenty pills, the building trade would be backlogged with orders for new jails. The Wanchor is a welcome sight, a warm and friendly respite from the frosty air. Light pours from its windows, a gush of voices spill from its open door. Inside is hot and smoky, packed tight with bodies standing shoulder to shoulder, talking, laughing, drinking, singing. The Jukebox is just another noise in the fluctuating roar. I try to squeeze my way towards the back of the pub, away from the bar, where things will hopefully be a bit less crowded. My feet are stepped on and I am jostled and elbowed as, politely as I can, I attempt to force a path, aware despite my inebriated state that bumping the wrong elbow, resulting in a spilled drink, or the back of your hand accidentally brushing the wrong girls arse, could lead to a severe beating. I see Dinnet and some of his cronies, occupying a corner near the bar. I bet no one would step on his feet if he tried this, I think bitterly. I wonder to myself if I should be worried about Dinnet being here. Probably not, I decide. He hasn’t seen me, and I’m probably one of a hundred people he’s started on in the last week. Still though, probably best to avoid him anyway. It is less crowded in the back, and we have space to breathe. We all eye the queue at the bar with distinct lack of enthusiasm, until Mike finally bites the bullet and goes to get a round in. Just as he is leaving a minor miracle occurs. The table of guys next to us get up to leave, and within five minutes of walking into a crowded pub we not only have seats but a table as well. I squeeze in next to Stevie. Wild Thing and The Discopistol, who has sobered up a fair bit, grab seats on the other side of the table. We dump our jackets on a fifth seat for Mike and Wild Thing puts one foot up on it in the age old, fuck off this seat’s taken, stance. I notice that someone has chalked the words, yer ma, aye? The hairy oyster, aye? The bearded clam? Ten pounds of hingin liver? on the blackboard next to the pool table. We wait patiently for five minutes for Mike’s return. Five minutes turn into ten, and then into fifteen, and patiently turns into impatiently. We can see Mike, roughly half way to the bar, impotently waving a tenner up and down. “This could take a while,” I observe. I am just offering my fags round and The Discopistol is trying to do an unspecified trick with a beer mat and failing dismally, when I feel a hand on my shoulder and a voice speaks in my ear, so close I can feel the breath on my cheek. “Hello stranger.” Her hair brushes my cheek and one breast touches lightly against my shoulder. She flicks hair out of her eyes with one hand as she leans in towards me, smiling. She gets these little dimples at the corner of her mouth when she smiles. We are close enough that I can feel the heat from her body. She smells of orange blossom and honey. “Hi Cally,” I say. “How’re you doing?” “I’m fine,” she says, a little bit pissed. “How’re you?” “Dying of thirst, but apart from that, just dandy.” She raises an eyebrow. “Mike went to get the drinks in quarter of an hour ago and he’s still nowhere near the bar,” I explain. She laughs and holds out her hand. “Give me your money,” she says. Bemused, I fish a tenner out of my wallet and hand it over. She takes it, smiles sweetly, and disappears in the direction of the bar. “Fucking hell!” The Discopistol sighs. “Aye,” observes Wild Thing. “I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating Cheesy Wotsits.” I feel a prickle of anger at this, deep down in my gut. Stop it, stop it, stop it! I say to myself. Exactly two minutes later she’s back with four pints of lager. “How the fuck did you do that?” I ask, shaking my head in wonder as she plonks the pints down on the table and hands me my change. “It’s a talent,” She says and winks. “Are you going to Starski’s later?” I nod. “Well, see you there then.” She turns and walks away to join her friends, a group of it girls taking up a table in the corner. They catch us looking over at them and stare back with cat eyed hostility until we look away. When Mike comes back a few minutes later with a tray of drinks, he stares in bemusement at the pints on the table. His slack jawed look of puzzlement had us all in helpless fits of laughter. In fact we were laughing so hard that it was a full five minutes before any of us could enlighten him. Deep down, amid the creases and folds of laughter, I could feel the pill starting to do its work. We are all totally fucked by the time we get to Starski’s. On the way up the lane Mike goes for a pish. I stand a little bit up the lane, facing the other way and waiting for him. Out of the corner of my eye I see Mike do a little double take and squat down next to a bush. “Look what I found!” Mike says, holding up a bottle of Red Square vodka, still three quarters full. “Fuck, where’d you get that?” “Someone had stashed it in that bush.” “Fuck em, good steal!” We make our way up towards Wild Thing, Stevie Dead and The Discopistol, who are standing at the top of the lane, re-stashing the bottle in a different bush on the way. I came up in the Wanchor, and as a result, ended up blabbering complete shite to the women in the chip shop we stopped in to get something to eat. I bought a chip and cheese buttie and a can of Irn Bru. I looked at the chip buttie for a while, prodded it a bit, and threw it over the nearest garden wall. The thought of eating right now is inconceivable, alien, repulsive. I have better luck with the Bru. The queue at Starski’s is huge and irritable. We wait a restless ten minutes to get in. I pass the time by looking at the others as a gauge to how fucked I look and fretting that I won’t get in. We do get in though, no problem (apart from the customary search). As soon as we got through the door I knew something was up. Nothing you can put your finger on, but you can feel the bad electricity in the air. I wobble up to the bar to get a round in, holding onto the sticky, alcohol encrusted bar top for balance. As I order I notice I am standing next to this guy called Wayne who was in my registration class at school. A bit of a numpty, vaguely irritating in a nebulous kind of a way, but harmless enough. I get talking to him because he is one of those people who is a few rungs down on the social ladder from the members of the small town aristocracy (football players, hard men, it girls etc), but is incredibly impressed by them. If he gets one of them to talk to him he will drop their name into every conversation he has for the next six months, as if they were best buddies. Me and…insert name of wanker…were…insert name of activity…Yeah, we were there all day, just getting totally fucked. Yeah, he said it would be his turn to pay for all the drinks next time. And so on, and so on. You get the picture. But as a fan of the small town celebrity, he is as clued up about what is going on, as a twelve year old girl is about the doings of her favourite boy band. Therefore in a situation like this he can be a useful source of information. “Yeah, you see those big fuckers over in the corner,” he says after listening to him for five minutes. I look across. There are four boys at a corner table who could indeed be described as big fuckers. “Well three weeks ago, Morgan (Morgan Brewster. Wayne has the annoying habit of using first names as if he has known the knob-end in question for years) bottled one of them outside the Anchor. So they’re up here looking for him.” I look again, careful not to stare. Kickers jumpers and Jeans, they sit there nursing pints and glaring at people. I notice that one of them has a spiky black line of stitches running down his cheek. I don’t recognise any of them, which means they’re not from here. Probably from the next town up the road, I think. That would explain it. They probably came down here and acted hard, upset the local alpha males. After the fight Brewster probably beat his chest and went round pissing on every lamp post in town to make sure his territory was properly marked. I say my goodbyes to Wayne and take my drinks back over to the table which the others have bagged in the corner, far away, I am glad to note, from the big fuckers. “What were you talking to that arse for?” Mike wants to know. “He says some fucker’s on a hiding tonight.” Mike starts to laugh. “What from that little bollocks?” “No, no, no. Right, don’t look, but,” they all look round. “See those cunts in the corner. They’re up here looking for Dinnets mates. Brewster n’ that.” “How come?” Stevie asks. “Dunno, Brewster glassed one of them I think.” No one looks at them too long. They are radiating trouble like a heat haze off hot tarmac. Dinnet turns up about half an hour later. I have just necked another pill and am feeling better than I have any right to, given the amount of drugs and alcohol I’ve consumed in the last twenty four hours. He clocks them straight away. I watch him out of the corner of my eye. He goes over to a corner beside the bar where a few of his crew are sitting and orders a drink. This guy, Barry Nemsdale, gets up to talk to him, and they stand heads close together for a few minutes. Then Nemsdale turns back and leans over the table, talking rapidly. Dinnet gets his mobile out and dials. “Bandits in the ville, repeat, bandits in the ville. Require immediate back up,” I mutter to myself. “What?” Mike shouts, his voice half drowned in the blaring music. “Nothing,” I say. “Doesn’t matter.” Time passes and nothing happens. The atmosphere relaxes a bit. I notice that a couple of the big fuckers are up on the dance floor, strutting their ungainly stuff and trying to pull. More than once I find myself looking around for Cally. Out of the corner of my eye I see Morgan Brewster and Danny Steele (or Steel Stack as he’s known amongst the wanker fraternity) slip discreetly in the door with a couple of other boys in tow. Because our little table is tucked safe away in a corner I start to feel a little like a spectator at some kind of sporting event. Safely out of the firing line, relaxed by the second pill kicking in, I settle down to watch the entertainment. “Wish I had some popcorn,” I say to nobody in particular. The big fuckers have not seen the hyenas arrive. I watch Dinnet and his friends through the smoky, disco-lit darkness. They stare across, like a pack waiting for the moment to pounce. They are very still among the moving bodies. Hard, narrowed eyes, watchful and intense. In the end it’s Dinnet that does it. Without ceremony or fuss, he simply walks across the dance floor and with deceptive casualness and headbutts one of the big fuckers square on the bridge of the nose. There’s no way I could have above the din of the music, but I’m sure I can hear the crunch as his septum disintegrates. The boy falls to his knees, cupping his injured nose with both hands, and Dinnet starts laying fuck out of his head. He must get in a good fifteen punches before the bouncers are there, grabbing both by their arms and attempting to drag them towards the door. Unfortunately both sets of back up arrive at the same time. Shoves are exchanged and a couple of punches are thrown. Everybody in the place is on their feet or standing on their chairs for a better look. A screaming, shouting, pointing, mob. The bouncers are dragging Dinnet and the other guy, dark clots of blood streaming down his chin, towards the door as fast as they can. They just want them out of there. The fact that throwing them both out the door at the same time will have roughly the same consequences as throwing a rabbit in a cage with a Rotweiller doesn’t bother them. They just want them out the front door. What happens in the car park is not their problem. The crowd, including both sets of back up, surges forward in their struggling wake. The bouncers manage to chuck them out the big double doors and try to shut them. At this point I stop being able to see properly because of all the heads trying to crane above each other to get a good look. The bouncers are trying to keep people back but above the gaggle of heads, there is the suggestion of shouting and a windmilling of fists. I am gradually being shoved and elbowed to the back of the crowd, so I give up and head back to my seat, picking up a couple of unguarded drinks on the way. Stevie is sitting at the table exactly where I left him. “What’s going on?” he asks. “Dunno,” I say. “Couldn’t see.” There is the sound of screeching car tyres and an intensification in the shouting behind me. Stevie never even got up to watch. I cast a glance over my shoulder at the vultures and feel a little ashamed. I down both the vodkas. “Drink?” I ask. “Why not,” he says. I lean over to the next table and hand him one. We get a blow by blow description from a breathless and excited Mike. The police have come and gone, carting a handcuffed Dinnet off in the back of a riot van. Dinnet's mates, Brewster, Steele and co, have done a hefty shoot and the guy Dinnet kicked the shit out of has been taken to hospital by his mates to get stitched up. According to Mike the boy was a mess. People start to filter back in, the excitement over with. The music, which stopped when things kicked off, comes back on again. It is almost like nothing happened. A guy at the next table looks round in bewilderment, the entire round of drinks he bought just before the fight have disappeared. I must have blacked out then, because the next thing I know I am in the toilet leaning over one of the sinks. My heart is thrashing against my rib cage and I am gasping for breath. I look at my face in the mirror. I am cheesy pale and there are dark smudges under my eyes. The beat of my heart is a dull, thump-thump-thump, in my ears and my neck. “Overdoing it, fucking overdoing it,” I mumble incoherently to myself as I spoon water from the tap into my mouth with a cupped hand. I lock myself in a toilet cubicle and sit with my head in my hands, and gradually the tension drains from my body. My heart stops going mental and my breathing begins to slow. I take deep breaths until I begin to feel better. Fuck, I think, that wasn’t good. That was like a fucking seizure or something. I mentally debate whether to neck another pill. I decide against it. Pills are in short supply tonight. Polish all mine off and there’s no chance of buying any more. That will only lead to frustrated desperation in the early hours of the morning. I neck one anyway. I now have only two to see me through the night. I bump into Cally as I am weaving my way across the dance floor towards our table. She grabs me around the waist and yells something in my ear. “What?” I bellow back. “I said, want a drink?” I nod and she grabs me by the hand, sending a pleasant little shock of surprise running up my spine, and leads me up to the bar, to the furthest away end where the music isn’t so loud. “Oh shit,” she says. “I’ve left my purse in my bag.” I roll my eyes in mock exasperation. “I’ll get them then.” She laughs. “Aw, shucks, you’re too good to me. I’ll get the next ones.” I order a vodka and coke and a pint of lager. I mentally congratulate my self on how coherent I’m being. “So what have you been up to tonight?” she asks as I hand her her drink. “Oh just a few quiet beers and stuff, you know.” She starts pissing herself laughing. “What?” I ask, perplexed. “Sorry, sorry,” she says wiping her eyes. “But you’re mashed out of your face!” Fuck, I think. “Is it that obvious?” She nods. “I could tell from right across the room.” Then she gives me this sort of embarrassed sideways glance, as if she has said the wrong thing. “Does it bother you?” I ask. She shakes her head and gives me a wan smile. “No,” she says. “And look,” she grabs my forearm, “I didn’t mean anything by it. Most people look really fucked up and ugly when they’re mashed but you look ok. Just, um,” she circles her hands, looking for the word. “Happy, that’s all. It’s quite cute actually.” I think the toxins have fucked my blush mechanism because although I feel like I should be blushing, I don’t. Probably a good thing. I blush internally though. A big red internal beamer. Am I completely stupid for thinking that was a come on? I mean that was a come on , wasn’t it? Am I really getting the vibe from this girl? This girl, who is going out with my flatmate? I am not good at picking up on these things at the best of times, let alone in my present condition. My mind has gone completely blank. I am aware that I am about to speak but have absolutely no idea what I’m about to say. My brain seems to have settled back to await developments with interest. I wonder if being angry with my brain on such a regular basis can be entirely healthy. Then with a jolt I realise that I am talking. “So, where’s Dan tonight?” Bollocks, surely the worst possible question I could have asked. I decide that I am completely justified in being angry with my brain. She gives me a sour look, which causes me a moment of panic, until I realise that the look was not directed at me but by proxy at the absent Dan. “At home, boring bastard, watching the football. Wanted me to go round and watch it with him, probably so he could spend all night patronising me by explaining that the round white thing is a ball.” I realise that if ever there was an opportunity to ask her the question, this is it. It actually forms on my lips, Cally, why are you going out with that wanker? But my train of thought is suddenly and brutally derailed by the realisation that I have just admitted that I haven’t been home in the last twenty four hours, which implies that I am still wearing the same clothes I went out on Friday night in. This is of course true. I become acutely aware that I probably look a real mess and smell none too fresh into the bargain. “He’s so serious all the time and he never wants to have any fun. I don’t know,” she sighs. “When I first met him, I thought he was different, I liked him because he was quiet and serious. He was different from all the other cocky, sleazy wankers in this town, but now.” She looks up at me, then her eyes widen. “Oh Jesus, I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t be saying these things. He’s your flatmate. I’m really sorr…” “Cally,” I interrupt, cutting her off in mid sentence. “It’s me remember, I know exactly what he’s like.” She gives me a smile, full of real warmth. “Want another drink,” she asks. “Love one,” I smile. “Wait here then, I’ll just get my purse.” As I watch her retreat across the dance floor I feel an elation which has nothing to do with drugs. As I am draining the dregs of my pint I catch a movement out of the corner of my eye. This girl Sarah, one of Cally’s friends who was giving us the evil eye in the pub, is storming across the room towards me. Her jaw is set and she is glaring at me. She grabs my arm and I feel long nails dig in. “Alright Sarah?” I ask trying my hardest not to show that she is hurting me. “Don’t you alright me!” she hisses. “Why don’t you just leave her alone?” “Eh?” I stammer, unable, in my strung out state to grasp what she means. “Cally,” she spits. “She can’t go anywhere without some fucking loser sleazing all over her. She doesn’t need it from a weirdo like you as well!” She digs her nails in harder and I have to fight the urge to yelp. She leans closer, close enough so I can smell long vodkas and Marlboro Lights on her breath. “What makes you think she’d even go near someone like you for fuck sake? So just fucking leave her alone, right!” She punctuates her last word with a final squeeze of her talons before releasing my arm and marching back across the dance floor. I have to fight to regain my composure. Stay cool, stay cool, don’t let this fucking bitch think she’s got to you. “Sarah!” I call after her. She turns. “What?” “Your arse looks fucking huge in those trousers.” “Fuck you, you sad-o.” Then I am gone. Because she has got to me. This shouldn’t happen. I walk past the bouncers and out of the double front doors, the cool air like a splash of cold water on my burning face. Nothing should be able to get to you when you’re mashed. You should be invincible. My reality padding has been torn away, leaving only stark ugly bones of truth beneath. I have heard these things she said before, only it’s usually the voice in my head saying them. Her opinion of me is also my opinion of me. Someone slagging me off I can take, but what Sarah said hurts so much because I know it to be fundamentally true. Shakily I light a cigarette and look up at the sky watching my smoky breath dance against the stars. I stand there in the middle of the car park. Did Cally put her up to that? I can picture the scene in my head. I look down at my arm. There are five red half moons, like grinning mouths, dug into the flesh of my forearm. A little blood is seeping out of each of them. It looks black under the streetlights. I hear the bang of the double doors and a voice calls my name. Cally’s voice. She comes towards me across the car park and she is crying. Not properly, just a little. Not the great heaving sob kind of crying but the slow tears running down the cheeks and a funny little kink in your voice kind. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “That bitch Sarah told me what she said. She had no right to say that. I didn’t ask her to say that. Please don’t think I asked her to say that, because, because, because, I really like you.” Her face crumples up and I reach out and gently fold her into my arms. I can feel her quietly sobbing against my shoulder.” “C’mon,” I say. “It’s cool.” I feel like a real shit for even contemplating the Idea that she might have asked Sarah to say what she did. “What she said,” she sniffs in a small voice. “It’s not true. I don’t think it’s true.” I let her go and she looks up at me. Panda eyed with mascara. Then she looks down at my arm. “My god, your arm.” She takes it in both hands and looks at it for a long time. “Its ok,” I say. “Really.” She looks up at me again. A strand of her dark hair is plastered to her cheek with her tears. I brush it back behind her ear. Then I lean forward, and I kiss her. That second, the second I am kissing her, is the longest of my life. The second until she pushes me away. Her eyes are huge. Her bottom lip trembles slightly and she pushes the hair back out of her face. There are tears in her eyes again. She turns and walks quickly away, and the noise of her retreating high heels on the concrete fills my world. I just stand there for ages, then I go and sit on the kerb with my head in my hands. After a long, long, time I stand up and go to the bush with the bottle of vodka stashed in it. I use it to wash down my two remaining pills. And then, bottle in hand, I walk away from the light, and let the darkness swallow me up. There is daylight, and it has a flat hard quality, like slate. I am cold. I try to roll over but I can’t. I let out a groan and it sounds like it comes from someone else, far away. I try to sit up and the world oscillates and rolls like the view from a gyrosphere, and everything is ringing, loud and terrible, like church bells inside my skull. I am, I realise, in the untidy patch of garden out the back of my building. A patch of flattened thistles and compressed earth mark the place where I have been lying. I pull myself and stagger towards the back door. Supporting myself by holding onto a drainpipe. My clothes cling wetly to my freezing body. A revolting smell is rising from me in waves sending giddy thrills of nausea through my being like bubbles climbing the neck of a bottle of lemonade. My t-shirt, heavy with vomit, hangs from my chest in thick ropes. But worse than this, I have pissed myself. My trousers are wet through and the smell of urine hangs around me like a yellow cloud. Slowly, I drag myself up the stairs towards my flat. I unlock the door and throw my rancid, clotted clothes into the washing machine. I go naked through to the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror. I have a burst lip and my eye is swollen and purple. My body is covered in bruises and scratches. I stand under the shower, not even noticing if the water is hot or not, for what might have been five minutes, what might have been an hour. Then I go through to my bedroom and pull myself into bed. I lie there looking at the five sickle shaped wounds on my forearm. Then after a while, I pull my pillow over my head and I cry. For shame and horror and sickness; I cry.
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