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	Chapter Eight
	Sunday 10:30 am. I wake up in my bed, amid a knot of screwed up bedclothes. I lie still for a while, my head throbbing slowly, a harsh rattle in my breathing that speaks of too many cigarettes the night before. The slow beat in my head is like the pulse of a heart, as if some lunatic surgeon had done a transplant in the night. The room is flooded with clear morning light. I blink open my eyes. The curtains are open. I sit up to pull them closed and wince, covering my head with my hands, as the pulse in my head rears up and becomes a great whamming fist beat. Awkwardly, I yank the curtains closed and flop limply onto my back to wait for the thrashing pain in my head to subside. I pass out again for a while. When I wake again my mouth is so dry that my throat appears to have locked up, like I’ve been eating super glue. I notice that there is a half-empty glass of water on my bedside table and down it in one, noticing as I swallow that my throat hurts like fuck. Where the fuck were you last night? I realise that I have no idea. C’mon, think. Retrace your steps. Ok, ok. You got home from work at half past five, stopped at Tesco to get a carryout. Got a chipper for tea, opened your first beer about six. So far so good. Stevie and Mike got here about half seven, you were already pretty pished by that time. No problems there, I can remember everything up to that point pretty clearly. So what then? We were going to go down the Wanchor for a while then up to Andy’s party. I finished my carryout, then we went. Oh fuck, that’s not strictly true. I remember now, I double dunted before I left the flat, two of those pills Stevie and Mike gave me for my birthday. Shit. I can’t remember being in the Wanchor at all, fuck knows if we even went. I can sort of remember getting to Andy’s flat. Then only a few fragmentary images after that and…oh fuck! Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh no! I suddenly jerk upright in a spasm of recollection. “Oh fuck,” I breathe. The last thing I can remember is Andy throwing me out of his front door. When I say throwing, I mean he had me by the throat. I remember not being able to breathe, and he threw me backwards out of his front door to land hard on concrete. I look at my elbows, raw scabs are the evidence of where I hit the pavement. I can remember Andy shouting, I don’t know what, and Wild Thing holding him back and shouting at me to just fucking go. After that, nothing until the morning. I wrap my arms round my head and lie back again. I take a deep breath, hold it, and let it out in a long shuddering exhalation. I can remember the effect but not the cause. What the fuck have I done? It could be anything. This thought sets paranoia loose like a spinning dervish in my brain. What have I done? Quite bad? Very bad? Lynch mob turning up at your door bad? I wrack my memory but it’s simply not there. The answer to my question will not just appear out of fresh air. The simplest course of action would be to phone Andy and apologise, but I’m not prepared to do that without being forewarned about what I’m apologising for. Did I puke down the side of his sofa, or did he catch me with my hand down his sister’s knickers. Andy’s sister is fourteen and if the rumours are true an absolute slapper. Thing is, he doesn’t see this. He just sees his wee sister so he’s really protective of her. He once smacked Wild Thing in the mouth for joking about shagging her. Mind you, you never can tell if Wild Thing is being serious when he says things like that. Andy does have a really short temper though, so maybe he was just pished and flipped over something minor. I go for a piss and there are bruises on the tissue of my neck. Five fingers and a thumb. “Doesn’t look like something minor,” I say to my reflection. I need to speak to either Mike or Stevie, they will tell me the scale and nature of my crime. They’ll tell me which is appropriate; a quick apology, or witness protection. I take my duvet through to the sofa beside the phone. I phone Mike first and his mother tells me in a weary tone that he didn’t come home last night. I hang up and try Stevie. “Oh no dear,” Mrs D tells me. “He’s staying at Michael’s house for the weekend.” Fuck. No help there. Not for the first time I regret our anti-mobile pact. We all had mobiles at one point, during the first explosion when everybody was buying them. They were though, a total pain in the arse. You were always losing them or breaking them, and you could never be arsed parting with the money for talk time. By the time we were all on our third mobile, we had decided enough was enough. We resolved never to buy another mobile phone again as long as we lived. If our current ones didn’t last, then we were not allowed to purchase a new one. We were all mobileless within two weeks. I don’t miss having a phone, but in situations like this they do come in handy. I turn on the television and wrap myself up in the duvet. I don’t feel as bad as I could do. This is because I am clearly still drunk. The hangover will kick in soon, as will the comedown, and the paranoia will crank itself up about four notches. The hangover will mask the comedown at first, then by tomorrow, it will have melted away like the flesh from a rotting corpse, leaving some particularly nasty bones exposed. Some simpering bunch of pricks are being interviewed on TV. Five? Westlife? Boyzone? A-fucking-1? Who knows, who cares. Music reduced to product, creativity boiled down to a fucking brand name. Art captured, chained, harnessed and made to pull the capitalist money machine. Would John Lennon have got past the first round of pop idol? I doubt it. I decide that because I am feeling reasonably ok, I should do something to pre-empt the hangover/comedown which is coming. I go to the kitchen and down a pint of water along with five or six of Dan’s assorted vitamin pills. I decide that eating something would be a really good idea, although the thought of actually eating leaves me cold. Thinking back, I don’t think I have eaten anything since Friday teatime. This is probably bad. I make my mind up to just bite the bullet and go to the Tesco café and have a fry up. Intellectually I know it’s a good idea. Protein, fat, and salt, probably just what my body needs right now, exactly right to restore its depleted energy levels. My mutinous guts, on the other hand, growl and complain at the thought. However, I overrule them. I pull on my jacket, and making sure I have both keys and money in the pockets, head out. Tesco is over lit, over bright and overcrowded. I weave my unsteady way through the Sunday lunchtime shoppers towards the café. Most of the seats are taken up by pensioners and parents with misbehaving children in tow. In the corner though is a table of tired looking young guys that I vaguely know. As I enter they start cheering and clapping, subsiding after a moment into laughter. People look round, glaring resentfully. They were obviously at Andy’s last night. I give them a wave and a forced smile. Here, I realise, is my chance to find out exactly what I did. I find that, in the event, I don’t want to know. Not from them at least. I don’t want to ask them, to further add to their amusement. I take a tray and a paper from the rack. I slide the tray along the metal rail until I am in front of the hot food counter. “Whatc’nIgetya?” asks the bored looking woman who is serving. “All-day breakfast,” I reply. I watch with a distinct lack of enthusiasm as she shovels greasy looking beans and burnt bacon onto my plate. I grab a carton of orange juice, pay, and sit down at a corner table, as far away as possible from the guys who gave me the cheer. I drink the OJ and make an attempt at eating the egg before giving up. It’s like eating cloth. I poke about at it for a while in the vain hope that prodding the soggy tomato and stale black pudding with my fork will somehow make them more appetising. I read the paper for a while but my head is too fucked to understand any of the articles. Another flash of paranoia. If you can’t understand the articles in The News of the World, which are written for mentally defective cretins, then surely you have done something serious to your brain. I look again. I read the words, I know what they mean individually, but I can’t fathom the meaning you’re supposed to get when they’re put together. With an increasing sense of hopelessness I read a story about Jordan the page three model being drunk at some film premier. Does it approve, disapprove, or what? Is it supposed to be light hearted or serious? I can’t tell. What, in fact, is the point of this article? Maybe there isn’t one. By this time my breakfast has congealed. Time to leave. As I walk back towards the flat, the volume on my hangover/comedown begins to turn itself slowly, but inexorably, up. I visualise it as the round volume knob on a huge stereo, rotating gradually but deliberately…7…8…9. I imagine my hangover as a Slipknot song growing steadily louder. A rattling, screaming, tuneless discord, thumping in my head and between my bones. I close the curtains and get under my duvet on the sofa with the TV on for company. Alcohol is a terrible and evil thing. Getting drunk is like lending your body for the night to someone with a bad sense of humour and little or no sense of moral responsibility. When you get it back in the morning, not only has it been poisoned, but you have to deal with the consequences of what it has been doing. Two people, one body. Jeckle and Hyde. Of course, society has no option to punish the body inhabited by both Dr Jeckle and Mr Hyde. Mr Hyde vomits in the back of his mate’s car, Dr Jeckle gets moaned at. Mr Hyde throws a bottle through the window of the bakers in the high street, Dr Jeckle gets arrested. Mr Hyde gropes a girl’s arse in a pub, Dr Jeckle gets beaten up in the street a few days later by an irate pipe fitter. Mr Hyde kisses his flatmates girlfriend, Dr Jeckle …no. Eventually I dose off and have a dream that I am being chased across a field by a pack of dogs. I notice as I scramble over a barbed wire fence to escape the blood thirsty pack, that there are also people on horseback, all done up in red coats and top hats. One of them is Dan, behind him are Dinnet, Morgan Brewster and Danny Steele. Dinnet raises a silver bugle to his lips and blows. Ding-dong, it goes. Ding-dong? Ding-dong. “Flgharg?” I say. Ding-dong, ding-dong. “What the fuck?” Ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong. “Alright, for fuck sake, I’m coming.” I stagger off to answer the door. I look through the peephole before I answer, just in case it’s a mob with pitchforks and burning torches. It isn’t, it’s just Stevie Dead. I let him in and he wobbles through to the sitting room and lowers himself weakly onto the sofa. “Fucking hell!” he says, massaging the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb. I realise that I am about to find out why Andy chucked me out of his house. I brace myself. Stevie rolls a bloodshot eye in my direction. Here we go, I think. “Where the fuck did you get to last night?” Fuck. “You mean you don’t know?” He shakes his head. “I was fucking trashed last night, I can’t remember hardly anything.” So I tell him. The whole story, as much as I can remember at any rate. “Sorry, haven’t got a clue,” he says, shaking his head again. Bollocks, I think, that’s a lot of fucking help. I try to take this as a positive sign. My reasoning is, that if Stevie can’t remember me being thrown out, or anybody talking about the reasons behind me getting thrown out, then it obviously wasn’t that big a deal. The problem with this theory is that it’s fucking rubbish and I know it. Just because Stevie was too out of it to remember what happened, doesn’t mean nothing happened. My situation has not improved at all, no matter how much I pretend it has. I am still stuck, sitting tight in the same boat as before. I ask where Mike has ended up and Stevie tells me that he’s still round at Andy’s with a hardcore of about five survivors, participating in a Super Sunday. Jesus Christ, that makes me feel weak and sick just thinking about it. Bad Fish. I shudder. I stick on The Doors on video. About half an hour later Dan comes back from his Sunday rugby match, sticks his head round the door, sniffs condescendingly, and departs again. Probably going round to Cally’s. My throat constricts and there’s a horrible pain in my chest which might have something to do with a mild drug induced heart attack, only I know it doesn’t, I know where it’s coming from and why. Maybe the first option would be preferable, I think, certainly less complicated and painful. We watch The Doors and then Taxi Driver, but halfway through Stevie decides he is hungry and needs to go to the shops. I can’t be arsed moving but Stevie harasses me into it. A bit of fresh air and daylight will probably do me good. Walking is not immediately easy as it seems my legs have seized up, but it gets better as I hobble my way down the stairs and out onto the street. It is a colourless, overcast day and the sky has the beginnings of darkness in it. I hadn’t realised it was so late. We turn onto the main street, heading for the square. While we walk we have a good natured argument about whether to go to Alldays or the chipper. As we make our way along the street I start to notice people looking at me. A group of girls passes, casting sidelong glances in my direction, looking away with hand-covered mouths when I look round, collapsing into fits of giggles. Two old ladies give me haughty, disapproving glares, the corners of their mouths turning down in displeasure. As we get into the square itself I am sure people are looking at me. Young guys standing in groups beside parked cars pause in their conversations, either looking at me and grinning, or staring with hostile expressions on their faces. We hover outside Alldays, the chip supper Vs Kit-Kats and bags of random crisps debate, still not quite having resolved itself. I decide I could maybe eat something now, and decide on a haggis pudding supper for roughly the same reasons I decided on the abortive all-day breakfast earlier in the day. We stand in the dingy, steamy interior of the chipper for fucking ages. Sunday teatime is probably their busiest time of the week. But we have made our decision and we are sticking with it. We wait it out between a small skinny man with a moustache and a comb over, and a fat woman with a cheap red anorak and a face to match. The combined smell of chip fat and vinegar is making me nauseous so I study the menu to take my mind off it. Battered Mars bar supper, £2.50, Battered pizza supper, £3.00. Battered Pizza, Jesus Christ! What kind of person eats a deep-fried battered pizza for fuck sake? Two places in front of the queue someone is enquiring if they do battered chips. “Dunno,” says the girl behind the counter. She looks back over her shoulder at someone I can’t see. “Sandy! Sandy, do we do battered chips?” There is a silence while she listens to a reply I can’t here. “Aye, chips in batter; battered chips!” The silence again, and she turns back to the customer. “£1.60 is that ok?” The customer nods to confirm that it is. She scoops some chips, already cooked, into a kind of shovel, dunks them into the batter mix and slops the resulting mess into the fryer. The guy pays and five minutes later is presented with a bag of chips fried not once, but twice, coated in deep fried batter. I look at the guy, he looks normal, about my age. I think he may even have been in my year at school. There’s my answer. Who buys battered pizzas? We do. I look at Stevie. He looks unwell. We don’t really have a chance do we? We drink, we smoke, we take drugs, we eat battered pizzas. Any one of these would be bad enough on its own. I look out at the street, at the people walking past and I don’t see people. I see strokes, heart disease, cancer. We’re killing ourselves with our lives and there’s not a thing we can do about it. “D’you want salt and vinegar on that?” the counter girl asks. “Aye please, loads of salt,” the customer replies. It is another ten sweaty minutes before we finally get served. I request a haggis pudding supper. The girl behind the counter, who I have never clapped eyes on in my life before, writes my order down on a piece of paper and says. “You were in some state last night.” Fuck sake. “Yes,” I say. “I probably was.” I look round at Stevie for support but he looks tired, too tired even to smile. We take our chips back round to mine and eat them in front of the TV, watching The antiques road show and then Monarch of the fucking glen. Around nine the doorbell goes. When I look through the peephole everything is black. Someone is standing with their thumb over it. Oh fuck, I think. I consider simply not answering it, but then I here a voice that reassures me that it’s not a vigilante mob. “Open up fuckhead, I know you’re in there. I can hear you breathing.” Mike. I open up and let him in. He enters swaying and singing, a can of Tennents Super in one hand. “Hey Mike?” I say but he ignores me. “Alright Deadboy you fucking poof!” he shouts when he sees Stevie and flings the now empty purple can at him. I try again. “Mike, do you remember me getting flung out of Andy’s last night?” But this gambit is also ignored. “Got anything to drink in this fucking shit hole?” he enquired grinning. At least now I have his attention. “Listen Mike, remember me getting thrown out of Andy’s last night?” He thinks for a moment. “Yes,” he says finally. “Do you remember what I did?” He looks at me uncomprehendingly for a second, and then creases up with laughter. I just stand there listening to him piss himself. I don’t even have the energy to get annoyed. I fold my arms and wait for him to regain control. After a while, after a good many breath hitching pauses and fresh explosions of laughter, he begins to get a grip of himself. He takes deep breaths, eyes streaming and face red. Eventually he is able to speak again, and he tells me.
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