Chapter Nine

A gasp of air. A sharp intake of oxygen. An inflated lung and my eyes open. On my bed, in clothes that smell of everything but clean. My head is throbbing like a drumskin. Reverbs and echos of the night pass through me. I sit up, holding my head, trying to remember what happened. All i can find is a rough outline of events, but there's more to it. It seems that everything moved so fast, so fast that i couldnt see it. Like a hummingbird's wings, life moved so fast that i didn't even see it. A bit like my life up till she left me. Moving so fast and with no jerks or jumps that i didn't even see it pass me by.
As i do the little things, the little things come back to me.
As i brush my teeth, i remember her. As i pull on my clothes, i remember the brief exchange of cold words. As i brush my hair, i can see her face. She pulled me home, well, she pulled me here. My hotel room. And the look on her face. One of such utter and complete pity. It make me sick to my gut. I could feel the insides of my stomach want to come up and out through my mouth just at the glimpse of that memory. I hated myself for bringing out such pity and disgust in another person. I sat down from doing my tie in the mirror. How could i lower myself to that? To the point when a random stranger sees duty to pick me up and tuck me in, all the time repulsed by me. It seems i have become the sob story. The personification of all those stories about the crumpled mid-life crisis turned suicide attempt. All those teenage problems and angsty woes that the older generation look upon as trivial and contrived. Thats me. Self-obsessed, Self-indulgent and... well, from the looks of things Self-Loathing too.
That's it.
Time to start again.

That's it - no more.
What is this i'm wearing? This suit of fake armour. I get up from my bed, wearing this suit minus shoes, socks and my tie not fully tied. I walk with a mission in mind and leave my hotel room. I march down the stairs, into the lobby and out onto the street. My feet taste the asphalt beneath it and i walk down that busy city street. I walk past the people on the street who stare but pretend not to notice. I walk past the bar where i died last night. I fucking waltz past those high street fashionista hell holes. I walk straight down into the tube, probably picking up some sort of skin disease from walking on these well trodden floors. I pay the man and i get on a train. Seeing as i am not fully dressed, i certainly do 'mind the gap'. Standing next to all the other black-clad communters i realise how dead they all are. To my left is an old woman. She looks at my feet, at the state of my shirt and of my hair, and asks "Bad Morning?"
"Actually, this morning i woke up reborn, shed the snakeskin of my former self and i am on my way to enlightenment"
"Oh, that's nice dear"

I'm back up on ground level. I find myself in some grotty corner of the city. Punks are walking around the place in full bodied leather and studs. They have makeup clad rock chicks chained to their bellybuttons and are pulling them round like dogs. Even in this madness they are the only ones who i see as truely being free. I run at the first shop i see and i buy myself some real clothes, not some painted facade that's designed to project an image of myself that is as real as the words my contempories speak. I find myself in the middle of nowhere with no one i know and nothing to do, with no money in my pocket and nothing to my name. I dump my scraggy suit by some homeless man, and i give him my phone and watch. I feel so free and i feel so alive. I feel reborn and i need to celebrate.
So - from safety to where...?

Chapter Eight

Eight steps towards the centre of the room, and I stop. Filthy fibres sneak over my toes; I tip my foot back to escape them and spin around on my heel. I am alone, which was not the intention when I stood up. Or the insinuation. Looking to the table, it's easy to see why. He's slumped over the "wood" of the tabletop, lips slightly separated like a couple who aren't quite ready to be seen together. Sliding from between them, a silvery snail trail of saliva dampens the nearest beer mat. His fingers twitch slightly next to his glass, flickering. It takes eleven steps to get back to the table, side-stepping around the suits and whores. It's the tarts and vicars party of the business world.

I tug at his cuff. It's damp, and on closer inspection is the colour of piss and mustard. There are three holes in the button holding it together, tiny white thread meandering between them. The edge of the shirt is fraying. His wife has just left him. His eyes grog open with the look that one only has when regaining consciousness. Once, twice... five times his eyelids struggle against the light, a losing battle until I push the ice down his collar and steal the key from his pocket. His hand pushes back the pepper-dashed hair on his forehead, and I take it in my own. As I pull him to his feet and away from the table, he reaches out for the rest of his drink and downs it in one. It takes two and a half seconds for the liquid to slosh into his expectant mouth, and another three to get the balls to swallow it. It seems to work wonders; he's soon traipsing behind me, hands on my hips, letting me lead him through the scrum. The whores aim glances over my head, eyes flickering to me, the suit on my tail, the direction we're headed in. The looks aren't meant to be hidden, and they're not. The eyelashes can't hide the malice in their eyes, the green monster that has taken over. It may not be him they want. Maybe it's me. Who can tell.

I run my hand up the banister as the staircase falls behind us. Seven... eight... nine... he stumbles behind me and I lose count trying to hold his weight. I place his hands firmly on the banister, let his head join them; regain the lobby and start again. Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineten to where he's at, eleven... twelve... to the landing. I check the number engraved on the key, the ridges filled with the God-knows-what of the past. His palms slide from my hips and away from me. He starts to lag, but we're inches away. The door opens with ease and I push him in and onto the mattress. He looks up at me imploringly.

"This isn't seduction," I mutter. "This is salvation."

Chapter Seven

When given the choice between taking the same dirt track through life that you've walked everyday for more years than you'd care to forget and a brand new and exciting smooth-surfaced tarmac 21st century transportation aid - what would you choose?
What road do you want to get lost down? You're going to get lost either way because you don't have a map. Nobody has a map. So you ask yourself - now that you have this choice - do you wanna get lost in style on the easy route - or some back-breaking ancient trail?

That night at the bar, when i was about to go over onto that new and exciting trail and start my journey into who knows what, i was saved by my guardian angel. The place was full of suits and slags and other forms of post-communter entertainment. Everyone talking trash to the garbage around them. I was drunk to say the least. I was fully aware that on my way into this place i looked far more innocent than the Armarni sharks and all the Gucci girlies with their red eyes and sharp smiles. The kind of people i would expect to try and sell me life insurance or stocks in their company whilst beating me to a pulp. And they looked to professional they'd probably get a sale.
I was going over to this girl with the blue ice-cream scoop hair and the puffin-black tears on her little pink pillow cheeks when my angel came and took me away. I'll never know what it was she was saving me from. She dived between me and Bubblegum Betty without looking at either of us, just waltzed through, grabbing a fistful of the top of my suit jacket on her way, and pulling me over to the a booth in the corner of the place, and not once did she look at my face.
I was dazed. Drunk as hell and pulled in what seemed every direction possible. The ceiling was bouncing up and down to some far-distant bassline, and the floor was jelly that seemed to have been doused in the most slippery, slimey substance possible. All the troubles about not knowing where my life is, my wife leaving me, my being homeless and some girl pulling me around the place all came to the front of my already crowded party of a brain and none of them left until i had been sat down in this booth for about five minutes.
She sat there opposite me, feet up on the cheery-red leather, smoking a long thin white stick and never once looking at me. She was edgy. Forget ants, it seemed like flesh-chewing death beatles were gnawing away in her pants.
When i finally came through: "Wh-who are you?"
"Mother Teresa"
"Really?"
"No"
"Oh. Well - what, i mean, what do you want?"
"I'm not too sure myself"
And then she stood up and left. I followed her movements with my head - as she lifted herself up from the seat she stood for a second and took a drag of her stick. She picked out a place with her eyes and started walking. One foot in front of the other with a slinky grace that you think is resigned only for supermodels. I don't know if it was me or the booze - but she was the hot burning effigy of simple, fucking, perfection.

Chapter Six

Don't worry about something that you won't be worrying about in a year. It's a beautiful theory.

I was sat on the carpet, grinding my knuckles into the strands and watching flakes of dead skin fall between them, for fourty-eight minutes. In that time, I took 1920 breaths and felt my heart beat four hundred and six times until the numbers confused in my head and I had to leave the flat. It started off in a crawl, until I managed to curl my fingers around the door handle and heave myself up to look through the keyhole. There's no one in the hallway, just a small spider meandering over the ceiling tiles. It may be drunk, I can't tell from here. The staircase folds in around me, a giant, concrete cocoon shrinking in on itself, on me. I have to breathe and count the steps and it's so hard, but if I lose count I'll have to slink up to the top and start again, and it might be too late - the cocoon will be sealed and I'll be stuck on this staircase forevermore. Three... one... two... three... two... four... five... one... six.... Freedom. I'm outside, in the scene where the heroine tells you she made it into the fresh air, except this air is worse than that in the concrete cave and i have to squint my lids shut against the smog.

Fifty-six strides to the first public house doorway I come across. I don't even bother to look at the name, I am still breathing and my hand is on my chest and the inside smells of bonfire night at grandma's. I sit at a table near to the fire so I can take in the scent of cremated wood, and stare at the table. Three beermats with the same logo and six cigarette butts in the ashtray, one still emanating a delicate whisp of chemical. How kind. Before I can order a drink, or consider what my first might be, I hear the legs of a bar stool squeal back and a middle-aged, greying-before-his-time suit stumbles to the doorway. Whats looks to be three feet from the doorway he comes to an abrupt halt in the face of a young girl with blue hair and raven-black cheeks from the make-up she's allowed to stream from her ducts. I see the situation, and I have to stop it. I know what will happen if they talk. So instead, I follow him to the door and take his arm. The girl with the blue hair finds another suit to prey on.

Chapter Five

In case anyone else is confused - i think it's time to assess the situation i have found myself wallowing in.
The walls here smell like they look and reflect the company with a pinpointed accuracy. I'm sitting at this long scummy bar holding a glass that i should be able to see through, but the thin film of dust (or what i hope is dust) along the bottom makes it somewhat translucent. I knock back another throatful of this cough syrup and reflect on my current life.
I'm approaching 38. I live in the suburbs in the south of England. where exactly is not important, because all of these places are exactly the same. I could go into any house on my street and cook a meal because all the draws and cupboards are the same. I could navigate my way throughout the house in the pitch dark; because these houses are exactly the same.
My life doesn't contain many surprises. I work in a big building in the big city where i am a paper-pushing slave-driven corperate accountant whore. My pay is good but i work a lot. Sometimes i think that maybe i work so much to avoid facing the future, or to avoid making an decisions as to what to do with my money or with my life... but any thoughts like these are soon driven out with more work.
I get up at 6.30 and get ready. I take the car to the train station where i catch a big metal railbus with a hundred other people all doing the same as me. You'd think that as we are all going to the same place to do the same thing, day in day out, that maybe we'd share a conversation or two, but no. Ants have more sociability than commuters.
So we arrive in the big city and i get to my building and i sign in and i go upstairs to level 24, accounts. But once i'm there i'm stripped of persona and i get on with my work in a 6x6 cubicle with a computer that doesn't work next to people who don't have any life left in them. My cubicle walls are blank apart from a picture of my wife and two kids and an old poster advertising a music festival in 1982, just to remind me that i used to be alive; once.
My wife is called Catherine and i love her. I thought she was going through a phase - like a mid life crisis for women. Whereas men get flashy cars or have affairs with young greedy women, i suppose women get more stroppy and more emotional and maybe decorate the kitchen? Admittedly, i don't know much about women.
So i was hoping this was all a phase. Hoping all this mumbling in bed about not knowing who she is or not having a life was all going to pass as she got into her age a bit more. This is all just a second adolescence, i told myself. I never thought this would happen.
I took another slurp of my cough syrup drink and motioned to the barman for another. There is an old jukebox on somewhere that is playing some old morning FM radio song. The kind of song those bastards at the station put on to trigger some memory in the minds of their communter listeners that makes them remember how they used to be alive and used to be interesting and then they throw themselves on the train tracks as the number 6 to the city arrives.
So Catherine was having sex with another man. Whether it was for the thrill or it was love or it was a phase or what it was, i don't know. The house is hers, the kids are hers, and she says she needs time to think. She needs time out of herself. She needs me to be away. She has packed my suitcase and with a face of nondescript emotion and blunt-tone seriousness she heaves it out of the house and hands me a scrap of paper with the address and phone number of a good hotel.
Bitch.
Slut.
Slag.
Whore.
I love you.

The cash in my wallet is gone with the exception of taxi money. All my stuff is in the hotel room and it's now nearing one AM. The drink is finished. I pick up my bones and set sail for the door. Of course, in my punch-drunk depressed state, a simple journey to the door can be a complicated procedure. As i get up from my bar stool a cloud of dusty dead skin from men who have sat her before, sad as hell because their wives have left them. In the corner of my eye i spy a young girl. she's got to be 19, maybe 20, 21? She's got a haircut that makes it look like a wig, and it's bubblegum blue. She's wearing a big puffy dress that wouldn't look out of place in a thrift store or flea market, and she's got tears and mascara streaming down her face. Do i go back to my hotel room and drink myself to sleep from an over-priced minibar? Or do i stay?

Chapter Four

Four seventeen and thirty six seven eight seconds, my key slides into the lock and makes the usual gunshot racket as it permits me entry to my home, this hovel that I have eaten, slept and fucked in for three months today. I say a cheerful 'hullo' to the pot plant, but it doesn't reply. I think it's sulking - I've not watered it for seven hours. It's being punished for dropping leaves all over my matte grey carpet, but I realise now that the punishment may be a little redundant - there are more shrivelled leaves on the floor now than before, so many that one could be forgiven for thinking that the carpet is brown. But it's matte grey.
The answer machine is giving me the evil eye as I fill up the jug. I don't know why - it can't be jealous. It wouldn't like to be watered, no matter what it thinks.

So, i end the thirst pact in the hope of keeping my floor clean and decide to find out why the machine is looking at me like that. It gives a few angry tones, then breaks into a not unreasonable imitation of my mother. Its impression has a metallic edge to it which I've never noticed before, but aside from that, the likeness is uncanny. The sound starts to grate on my head and the words start to fly around the room. They're bouncing off the walls and the furniture, nothing is safe and the plant looks none too happy about this assault. I pull the plug from the wall and gaze at the shards of words and meanings littering my home.

Chapter Three

The trip back home didn't really register in my memory. It seems i can forget things very easily. I rang the bell to my house and waited for my wife to let me in. It took her a little longer than normal, but i heard her clicking behind the door and then she let me in. When the door opened, she looked at me dead in the eyes. She was a vision: dark brown hair that flowed like choppy waves along a beach, a face that was slightly wrinkled after her years, but was still standing strong and she definatly looked younger than the age in her wallet. Catherine. Beautiful Catherine. Beautiful sweet kind and lovely Catherine. Beautiful Catherine, who's standing in the doorway. Beautiful Catherine who is holding a suitcase. Beautiful Catherine who is looking at me and without saying a word, has already told me that my life is headed for a rather large dip.

Chapter Two

I keep my eyes on the pavement. A quick look up, a glance to the side, something stealing my attention away could ruin the effort, so I concentrate on the weeds pushing their way through the void, the rain slithering over my shoes. Almost there. Just a few more steps - eight - and I'll have made it. Home straight. Fourth this week, in fact. Monday was... unavoidable. But if I can make this one, it'll make up for it, and I can sleep easy again tonight. Won't have to think. Seven steps. Six. Five. Four. Nearly there, almost done. Three. Tw-Fuck. Goddamn rain, goddamn shoes, goddamn pavement with its goddamn cracks. I can't move, I just sit and feel the damp spread through my skirt, onto my thighs; stare at the walls pasted over with endless stories of the world gone wrong. I can't even close my eyes, it's too late - the pictures and the prints have seeped through the corneas and imprinted themselves on the canvas of my mind. Death and disease in my dreams tonight.
My fingers find the concrete and take the weight from my ass. Even as I rise, my eyes are stuck fast to the walls ahead of me. It takes six shoulder-barges and a bag in the hip to push me on. I don't need to look down anymore, so I look at the faces instead. Nameless and soulless, they lock their eyes with mine for the three point seven seconds it takes to pass me by.

Chapter One

You never can tell what's going to happen next.
I was having a terrible day, even by my standards. Driving home from work is normally a blessing for me because it's my chance to run away from the day and start a-fresh in my head. The on coming drivers all had their lights on to see them through the dark and the wet and the slight film of fog forming in the air, but for some reason even the most timid of lights seemed to affect me like a lighthouse was glaring right in my face.
In an attempt at escapism i turned the radio dial up. Some old rock song from decades past filled the small space of my car and all it could make me think of was how small this space actually is. I was thinking about how easy it would be for me to be crushed in this small space if i crashed. I was thinking about this place being my own metalic coffin on wheels. I was having a minor attack of claustrophobia.
First my knees began to itch, and then my whole body was aggrevated by something or other, be it the temperature, the humidity, the air-con, the anything. I was patting myself down all over trying to calm myself down but it only made my driving erratic and my behaviour worse. I was praying for a lay-by or somewhere safe to stop but all i could see was lights, blinking, heavy lights firing one-by-one at me from the lane opposite. The roof of the car was getting lower and the doors were constricting like my spine against the grey cloth finish of my cheap cell-block of a car.
I began to notice the smallest things, like the rain dropping on the ground outside and the heavy-drops hitting my car. Each one sounded like another death knell annoucning the enevitable. My phobic attack was turning into a small scale panic attack and i needed to be off the road. Finally i spied a lay-by for me to stop in. I pulled up onto the gravelly track and the crunching sound under my wheels made me think of tanks in World War Two crunching over the piles of bones of dead prisioners. All these images flashing into my head, and they kept coming fast. I was in such a panic to get out that i couldnt negociated the door handle and had a job escaping, but when that door gave in the sudden blast of cool fresh wet air against my hot skin was the taste of freedom that i suspect a wrongly-convicted lifer gets after being set free.
I was outside in the pouring rain on my hands and knees kissing the gravel track and looking up at the dark sky above so i could taste the rain and reassure myself that i am here and i am real and this is all really happening and that i can deal with it.
It made me wonder, what had brought this attack on? Was i having a proper meltdown? Is this the tip of the iceburg? What is wrong with me?