EXCERPT PART ONE
Death of an Angel
Two spectres swim about the room like Angels startled by the strangeness
of their human form. The first, a fallen angel, whose murdered expression is as
dead as the rest of her, she’s weary and drags herself along. The second, with
glowing Cherub eyes, who’s still alive out there, somewhere in the city, right
this instant, without a doubt emotionally torn to shreds by my actions but, if I
know anything of her, still delighting in the dance.
It’s because of this Cherub that Death in the form of a lamprey, who is
most definitely no angel, has been knocking at my door for quite some time now.
This Cherub follows me into my dreams and turns them sour. Sour enough for the
lamprey to scent. This is one angel who’s killing me softly. As my mother was
over fond of saying to me when I was an over energetic kid she’s wearing me away
to a bus ticket.
Each glance from those angelic eyes rips into my flesh to this very day
with the savagery of a wielded dirk. Anger I can take, forgiveness, I find
unforgivable. This won’t go on for much longer, this lamprey that lives inside
of me is growing bolder by the day. She lives off my fear. Soon she will feast
on it.
A chip pan that’s caught the gas has found its way into my head. It’s
going to explode sending shards of skull fragments into the already crumbling
ceiling. I force my eyelids apart, the July sunlight’s abnormally furious, it
pierces holes in me.
This is hell. I see I’m on my own. I’m not usually on my own but I see
that any woman in her right mind wouldn’t have to look at this dump twice before
giving it a severe body-swerve. I wouldn’t blame her for one instant.
I shift and there’s an odd, hollow rattling. I’m not in a bed. I manage
to peer against the glare. I’m lying on a cracked, tiled floor of a rented room
in what had better be a very cheap hotel. I’m surrounded by a collection of
empty bottles and beer cans. It comes back to me, I took a swan-dive off the
wagon a week or so back.
Hell hath no fury like a bottle scorned. My brain’s still manufacturing
poison to fight off the poisonous alcohol that isn’t there. Ergo, it’s poisoning
me instead. Every nerve in my body’s screaming at the top of its voice like the
wife I’ve never had.
A little bit off in the distance stands a bottle with more than a whisper
of the amber nectar lurking mid-way up the label. The Booze Fairy’s been here in
the night. Bless her tiny soul. My entire body heaves a sigh of relief. I reach
out, unscrew the plastic cap, and take a big swig. My gut ignites. This
masochistic act jerks the self-preserving part of my brain into action. I take
another swig.
Now I’m capable of thought. I take out my Mobile. Push it close against
my half-working, half-open, bleary, bloodshot eyes, it tells me it’s ten-fifteen
and it’s a Thursday. Apart from this it’s a useless lump of tech. The contacts
section’s empty. I like to keep it that way.
I’m fully dressed, shoes and all. My suit’s in good nick. It should be,
it cost a bomb. I might be a piss-artist but I’m a well dressed one. My maternal
gran left me a monthly allowance and, to add insult to injury, my shag-buddy,
Nell, keeps buying me stuff.
I’m always being looked after by birds. Never ask for it, to tell the
truth it embarrasses the hell out of me but there’s no stopping any female once
she gets it into her caring head that some joker needs looking after. Nell’s a
frustrated nurse.
I stagger into the bathroom. I’m six-two, the mirror’s at five eight, I
bend my knees a bit. The mirror’s in a nasty mood, it lets me know what a waste
of space I am. I stick my tongue out to show it that I don’t care. How’s that
for being all grown up?
My name says that I’m from one of the twelve ancient clans of Scotland
but there’s more than a wee bit of the Viking staring back at me. I run some
cold water, splash my wee bit of a Viking kisser, flatten my hair and settle for
that. The bottle’s still in my left hand. I finish it.
I worked in the States for a fair bit so as our American friends would
have it, this is a window of opportunity. There’s no more rotgut in the room and
if I didn’t buy more last night then there wasn’t no cash. I gaze into the
mirror to see if it’s about to congratulate me on the astuteness of my deductive
reasoning but there’s only a troglodyte living in there so he ain’t able to
grasp it.
I’ve no idea of where I am but there’s always an AA meet going on
somewhere. Never again will I put me through this. This time it’ll be permanent.
I’m twenty-seven years old for Christ’s sake, I’m no kid any more. What I need
to do is to concentrate on some addiction that isn’t as dangerous in the dark
and doesn’t hurt this much in the light.
These thoughts trip and tumble over each other in their desperation to be
recognised. Before I’ve enough time to change my mind I rush out of the door and
down the hall desperately looking for an exit. I’ve no idea what door it is.
Let’s face it, in this condition I wouldn’t recognise an idea if it fell on me.
I find the lounge.
The telly’s on. Alethia Dawns is on. It must be a repeat of a repeat of a
repeat of one of her shows. She’s big time famous, she’s big time shaggable. My
heart stops every time I see this one but then, this happens with just about
every other guy in the entire country. We’re all being hypnotised. She acts on
us like a drug.
I felt passion once, real passion, and this is it. This is exactly how I
felt, way back then in my distant, virginal past. Not fondness, not sympathy but
that frighteningly awesome, soul-wrenching emotion that goes under the general
heading of love. I don’t feel much of anything these days. Haven’t done in God
only knows how long.
There, on the screen, with her astonishing grey-green, almost angelic
eyes, she just stares, listening to some calming mantra in her head. I’m
guessing it’s her director counting into her earpiece. Suddenly, like some
automaton having been switched on, her features break into that flashing,
infectious smile that makes her eyes dance and her perfectly formed breasts
deliberately quiver.
She does a sort of slight flounce of her shoulders so that those breasts
now jiggle and her dress is drawn upwards to expose the full length of legs. She
begins to stalk forward. She’s taunting the audience, she’s taunting me. Asking
the question, do I want her.
The resounding answer is, a million times, yes. In my well pissed
confusion, desire and the ultimate drug, love, fuse themselves into an erection.
My emotions are wide open. I shouldn’t be capable of having an erection in this
condition but I do. There’s a burst of music and rapturous applause.
I’m held bound in front of the home-cinema-size telly. At this moment in
time, held in the instant, there’s only Alethia and me. The dream’s faded, the
fantasy has shifted itself into the background. At this drunken instant, Alethia
and me have become a reality. An item. She fills me, overwhelms me. I relax into
it.
Finally, no more hiding, no more searching. I’m home. At rest with
Alethia, of all people, at our own fireside in out own cottage on an island,
Skye or Mull, where no one can reach me. Bliss. No aching, no pain, no promise
of the punishment to come. Only angelic bliss.
And then the instant’s gone, Okay, so I’m half-pissed. I’m released back
into this cheap, cold room in a cheap cold world on the outermost fringes of the
cheap cold Milky Way with only the hangover from hell for company.
Alethia Dawns is in her mid-twenties, bright, rich, witty, and a
published psychologist. Her programmes focus on the three main addictions, sex,
chemicals and firewater, you know, everybody’s into one of them these days. At
one time or another, I’ve managed to be into all three.
She’s right, all of them are drugs. They’re identical if not in nature
then intent, we use all three to get us off the sink-hole we’ve made of this
planet. It’s not a matter of giving up on drugs, in this modern world we just
can’t manage to get through the day without them, it’s a matter of choosing
which of them’s going to do you the least harm.
I have an epiphany, this is what I need to change my life. I need to get
out there into the real world and go after some woman just like Alethia Dawns,
this is the one thing that’ll stop the lamprey. A woman just like Alethia Dawns
and a family round me, my family, my kids, our kids. A life that’s accepted as
normal filled with shagging, sobriety and sunlight.
Everybody that I know, or have ever known, has talked about normality as
if it’s boring. It isn’t boring. This is boring. Being a tearaway day in and day
out. This is boredom personified.
A second wave hits me with the force of a Tsunami, why somebody like
Alethia Dawns, why not Alethia Dawns herself? If anyone on the planet’s going to
understand me then it has to be Alethia. The thought startles the hell out of
me. This is radical stuff. Her and me are perfectly matched, well, we would be
if I sobered up some, stayed off the hooch and settled for good sex on a regular
basis, I know this for a fact.
I’m astonished that I’ve never considered it before. It’s so obvious it’s
downright scary.
‘Give yourself a reality check, Michael my son.’ I’m talking to myself,
again. ‘You are pissed. A wee fantasy the likes of the one you just had is one
thing but what you are considering here is for real. She lives on a different
planet and you don’t own no spacecraft. She’s from way up there in the
stratosphere and let’s face it, fella, at this right good moment in time you
would be lower in her eyes than pond life.’
Disgusted by this rancid chunk of reality, I get back into the hallway
then head for what of all the doors can only be the front one. It’s got mock
stained glass on it with an angel, nimbused in light, ascending to heaven. Why
doesn’t the likes of this ever happen to any of mine? This Christian lot get
the one’s who offer them unqualified love and atheists the likes of me get the
one’s that give you the willies. Christian charity my rear end.
Out past the angel I rush. The sole purpose of her being here is to have
us mortals pause and consider. At this right good moment do I think of God? Do
I consider the fragility of my own mortality? Does the image of Lao Tzu, the
Buddha, Mohamed spring into my favoured brain? Like hell. The only thought that
manages to hit my noggin as I stagger and involuntarily brush against the door
on my way out is, ‘Fantastic tits.’
Out I go and stumble straight into the middle of a busy Glasgow Street
and its unforgiving traffic. I wasn’t to know that I was in the city centre, was
I?
There’s a screeching of brakes.
“Moron, I could’ve killed you.” The lorry driver drops down from her
cabin and is screaming up into my face from about chest level. As she braked the
huge metal fender did forcefully connect with my right leg. I experienced
something like it last year but with a private car.
I ended up in a plaster that nobody signed for six weeks. The rule of
thumb seems to be--if there’s a crunching sound then a bone’s been shattered but
if there’s just a jarring like now then it can only be bruised. I’m limping so,
no problem. Lay on MacDuff, do your damndest.
I ignore her and her anger and stagger on past. I know it’s swelling but,
thankfully, over the past week and whatever, I’ve downed enough Jungle Juice to
anaesthetise your average adult Killer Whale with a toothache.
I pause for thought, asking myself if I should slap her on the jaw or
something. I’d really like to do this. Not a big slap, just the sort of slap
that you see a doctor give to some woman on the telly that’s having a hysterical
fit. I figure it would be an act of kindness, really. She’s being way too
ridiculous about all of this.
I decide against it. Not only have I never slapped a woman, I’ve never
managed to slap anyone. The only slapping I know anything about’s what I’ve seen
in gangster movies so I immediately recognise this impulse for what it is, a
booze-induced fantasy.
Besides, by the look of her, unlike me, she’s not a thinker and a lover
but a right wee mental case. What’s clear to me is that this wee head-banger
would side-step my slap, kick me in my balls so that I doubled over and then
split my kisser wide open with her steel-toe-capped, working boots as I was on
my way down.
I decide that discretion is the better part of valour and do a runner.
“Want to be locked up, you alky,” she screams, “locked away for your own
good.”
She’s shaking, I’ve got to’ve given her a scare but I don’t give a toss.
I’d like to give a toss, I usually I do give a toss, especially as far as the
opposite sex are concerned. Really I do, I can’t pass a polystyrene cup if some
good looking young bird’s squatting on the pavement bursting for a fix without
tossing something in but this time I don’t care. My senses are in stasis.
I know what I’ve got to do. I know where I’ve got to be. I can’t stop for
anybody or any thing, my entire life’s about to change. If I so much as hesitate
then I won’t go on. I’ll just sit down and sleep against a wall. The cops’ll be
called in. I’ll experience the ignominy of having to spend the night banged up
in a cell.
I make good my escape and leave her cursing.
Now that I know exactly where I am, I know where the nearest meeting’s
about to take place. I stagger on. It’s only a few streets away in the local
Community Centre. All Community Centres look alike. Red roofed, white walled.
Prefabricated and with an unconvincing welcoming board up outside of the door.
In its unconvincing certitude it’s impossible to miss. I stagger on in.
The meeting’s always at twelve. It’s held down in the basement out of
sight of the real people who frequent the social events that they hold for real
people on the main floor. We do not socialise, we are the fallen. We are
tolerated but distinctly unwelcome. A sub-species. We haunt their imaginations
like the vampires and werewolves of ancient myth.
At the end of the entrance hall I fall down the short flight of white
concrete stairs leading to the basement. I twist my ankle. There’s a sharp burst
of pain before it’s, once again, numbed into non-existence by the moonshine
gifted by the Booze Fairy that I swallowed earlier.
This isn’t an AA group that I attend with any regularity but I’ve been
here before, they know me. Everybody knows me, I’ve been around for about three
years now, ever since I returned to my home city of Glasgow from a life in the
States. A country that has quite a few Glasgows of its own but none quite like
this one.
As I go in through the doorway of the meeting room I bump my head on the
door frame, no pain. This joins the previous bumps, I fell against the sink last
night when attempting a wash and again hit my head on the side of the toilet
seat as I crumpled past onto the tiled floor some time in the night.
This joker’s a right mess. He isn’t me. He’s a piss artist. He ain’t
anybody I’d ever want to know. The sooner he gets out of this brain of mine the
better. I want to exchange him. Christ, let’s face it, an orang-utan’s got more
self control and a whole lot more class. I want to specialise exclusively in the
shagging drug from now on. I have to keep my eyes open for the right
opportunity. Back to Louis Pasteur, chance favours the prepared mind and all
that.
The basement’s like all official basements, you smell it before you clap
eyes on it, whitewashed and damp. As we are transient ghosts we’re not allowed
to leave any trace of ever having been here. Not so much as a gravestone.
The posters are already up on the walls not with drawing pins but with
Blue-tack: Don’t lift a drink, lift the phone: Trapped? There is a way out.
Contact Alcoholics Anonymous: One Day at a Time: Live and Let Live: Keep it
Simple: Sssh, Don’t Wake the Beast: Only One Drink Away From Drunk, with the
Unity, Service, Recovery logo dominating.
The meet proper won’t start for other sixty-five minutes. Three women are
already there. Two of them making the sandwiches and the tea the third setting
out row upon row of tubular steel, green canvas seated chairs for the
congregation.
I watch them, women at work fascinate me. They’re so into it, so set to
the purpose, every single thing has to be just so. They actually care about the
look of everything. They want it to be pretty. They want it to give pleasure. Us
guys just want to please ourselves and get it over with, we just toss it all
down and see what’s on offer.
Minnie’s the first to respond.
“Christ, young Michael’s pissed.” Minnie’s eighty-five, to Minnie
everybody’s young.
Sandra, who’s in her mid twenties, divorced and looking after her four
kids, is right behind her. “Give him here.”
“What are we to do with him?” asks Karen, who’s only seventeen but is
already an established alcoholic, having been getting legless with her parents
since she was nine.
They no longer have lives, they have routines that shackle them to the
mindless repetition of their own personal mantra in the form of active
meditation. The knit, they talk, they walk, they clean, they slice, they bake,
they knit.
“Michael, you wi’ us?” Minnie asks.
“Yeah, yeah, of course,” I mumble.
“What’re you doin’ here, you here to quit?” asks Karen.
“Yeah, no, could be, don’t, don’t, don’t know.”
“Punters the likes o’ you sicken ma happiness, Michael, just piss off,”
frowns Minnie.
“Could spit in your eye and flood your memory,” snarls Karen. “Piss off,
waste of space.”
“I’ll phone you in an appointment with the Community Addiction Team,
Michael, you want me to do that?” asks Sandra.
Michael isn’t my real name, nobody tells the whole truth in life and in
AA where anonymity’s the name of the game it gets to be even worse. In AA a
Binman gets to be a fighter pilot, a career criminal gets to be a saint. You
name it, it’s accepted and acceptable. The Community Addiction Team’s National
Health, very official. They’ll want a real name, a real address and to do a real
background check. There’s no way I can handle this. I’ve got to stay out of
sight.
“No,” I say so forcefully that I unintentionally spray spittle all over
poor Sandra’s kisser. This sort of thing sets up visions of Dr Frankenstein’s
Monster after he inadvertently drowns the young girl in the original black and
white movie. Then he’s chased through the night by the mob into a windmill and
then the mill set on fire. I don’t fancy allowing nobody to put a match to a
bunch of firelighters under me, thank you very much.
“Don’t want that addiction lot, don’t want to get sober, just lookin’ for
some tea and sympathy. Well, you’re no’ gettin’ it here, Michael, now piss-off
out of our sight ‘til you decide to grow up,” Minnie’s serious, her tone’s
hard.
I stagger forward. The only barrier lying between me and the wall’s the
High Table. It’s already been laid out. Dark cloth with triangle facing the body
of the hall and the symbol of this particular chapter dominating the centre. A
big picture of the joint founders William Griffith Wilson to one side and an
equally large one of Doctor Robert Holbrook Smith complementing it on the other
side.
I see this before the table and me collide. As it’s only a foldaway
aluminium framed table it collapses almost as the same instant as I do and we
both fall to the floor in harmony. They say that crap floats, not in this
instance it doesn’t.
Bliss. I black out.
When I waken the meeting’s in progress and I’m sitting in the second row
from the back. My headache’s still with me. My gut’s churning. The acid from
throwing up over the week is still burning my tongue and mouth. My entire body
feels as if it’s been kicked by a rugby team. Apart from this I’m feeling just
dandy.
I see an apparition. Only two rows down sits Alethia Dawns, taller than
the people around her, even the guys. She’s here in person and even more
beautiful than on the telly. In some way she knows how much I need to be with
her and she’s made a point of coming.
She must have heard about me somehow. I know word’s got around that I
treat women right but I never thought for one minute that it would reach out
beyond the outer limits of AA. Sweet Jesus in the rain, I must be almost famous.
She is famous. She is a television star and yet she’s put me first, in
front of her career, in front of her way of life, in front of everything. She’s
made the first move. She is here and she’s so eager that I don’t have to do a
thing. All I have to do is say yes.
Then, in an instant, I’m dropped from a very great height and land on the
cold hard pavement of reality with an almighty thump. It’s not just painful it’s
downright embarrassing.
What a load of codswallop. My bloodstream has to still be producing
brain-rot. This crap is nothing but a bout of the d.t’s. I’m finally fodder for
the laughing factory, stick me on the assembly belt and shuffle me along on the
ga-ga belt, straight-jacket and all.
I look again, more seriously this time. This isn’t Alethia but somebody
that’s a whole lot like her and is all too real. She’s hot as hell.
I’m dumped unceremoniously back into my own body. Nothing’s changed. Not
a thing’s altered. It’s only the same old me. Headaches, body aches, you name
it, doesn’t matter a hoot, I still have to get randy for anything with long
legs, big tits and a heartbeat.
I’m always like this. This is my proof of existence. My way of getting in
touch with the throb of life once I’m on the way out. Always need the intimate
caress of a woman. Right now I need a woman more than I need oxygen. I’m
consumed by a desperate necessity to prove to myself that I’m still alive. I
desperately need a fix to calm me down. I need to know that I’m if not loved
then I’m at the very least loveable.
I’m not daft, I know fine well that what’s about to take place ain’t
love. I know exactly what it is but beggars can’t be choosers. I accept it for
what it is and glamorise it along the way until it fits the bill. Just about
every relationship that I’ve ever had except one has taken place entirely in my
imagination anyway.
I go towards any woman I’ve only just met as a promise. It’s not the act,
not the shagging itself but that single instant of expectation beforehand when
nothing seems beyond the pale. When I can actually believe that I might just be
able to hold it in my grasp again, the real deal. Heaven not on a plate but in a
bed, between the sheets.
But, strangely, the first time, the only time, way back in my virginal
years, that’s exactly what didn’t happen. There was no sex, there wasn’t even
any tongue bashing. There was only the certainty of being adored and of adoring
the close proximity of another human being. A tranquil yet exciting state of
existence far beyond the pale of everyday life.
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Children`s Fiction
Non-Adult Fiction
