

Novocaine

Ian Dyer

Life is good

And I feel great

'Cause mother says I was

A great mistake

Novocaine for the soul

You'd better give me something to fill the hole

Before I sputter out

The Eels: Novocaine for the soul

Also by Ian Dyer

Butcher and the Butterfly

Rottenhouse

The Clockwork Man

Concrete

This book is the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author. If you enjoyed this book then please encourage others to purchase their own copy. Thank you for respecting the authors work. ©

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and events are all from the authors mind. Any resemblance to persons either living or dead is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016 Ian Dyer.

All rights reserved

There's no earthly way of knowing

Which direction they are going!

There's no knowing where they're rowing

Or which way the river's flowing!

Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Steve, my little brother, he loved to watch the tele. He would stare at that square fizzle box for hours on end. Steve was transfixed by it, glued to it, and getting squarer eyes as the minutes turned into hours and those hours turned into days. But there was a plus side to that obsession. Whilst the tele was on in the background we would play, like most brothers played, mirroring what was happening on shows such as Bonanza, where we would match the quick draws and ride wild Mustangs as the cowboys rode theirs and we would rope the bison as they corralled theirs in those vast dry dusty plains. Watching and playing the A-Team, he would be Templeton Face Peck, I would be John Hannibal Smith, and the sofa was the great black and red-striped van. Sometimes I would have to be Howling Mad Murdock if there was a helicopter to fly, whilst one of our Action Man toys always played B.A. Baracus. We so wanted to be a part of the action, to be in the action, inside that square box where magic happened.

I remember this one day, when I was ten and he was eight. We tried to make a machine that would plug into the television and beam us straight into the tele so that we could become part of the shows that we loved so much. I knew it wouldn't work, I had a rough idea of how the world worked back then, and I was sure that if such a thing was already possible then it would already be available, some multi-faceted company like Atari or Amstrad would have released it by now. My brother, on the other hand, did not know a thing about the world at large. He lived in a fantasy world I myself never had the imagination to create. He was so set on it working I didn't have the heart to tell him otherwise, or set him up for disappointment, and maybe a small part of me was unsure, you know, perhaps it would work, perhaps we would end up being transported into that glass box in the corner of the room and become a character in the A-Team, or a human helping out the robots in Transformers, perhaps we would ride with the cowboys in Rawhide, fly through space with Jayce and his Wheeled Warriors, fall down the hole in the tree with Jamie and his Magical Torch, who knew. The world inside our Panasonic box had no boundaries so therefore neither did ours.

We built this contraption out of boxes and cables and stuff from dad's DIY cupboard and the thing even had a power cable and some twisty knobs from an old radio stuck into it now that I think about it, and I am sure we painted it and decorated it and put little signs on it so that we knew what each of the buttons were for and together we decided on how it would work, what each button would do. We even had a backup just in case anything failed. And it was all mounted on a piece of warped plywood that dad used to mix up his poly resins on and it stunk enough to make colours spin in front of my eyes. The power cable was connected to a hunk of metal that looked like a smaller version of the big power transformers you hear buzzing and fizzing outside of factories or housing complexes. It looked dangerous, like it would bite you if you got too close. The closer we got to completion the more my brother's confidence level of the machine actually working grew and grew and he had me going too, his enthusiasm was rubbing off onto me and my heart was racing and it felt like rabbits were hopping around in my stomach. His eyes were beaming with joy at the fact, the certain fact, that he was about to become a part of the shows we loved so much, that he loved so much.

The invention was built in secret, up in my room, in a fort we built out of chairs, bed sheets and my Super Ted sleeping bag. My brother, I think he was wearing a cowboy costume, though for some reason when I picture that day I see him in green and black camouflage gear, I can't quite remember, all I know is is that he was dressed up and ready to be blasted into the television and onto the set of whatever show was currently on.

When the invention was completed, and mum and dad had gone out, I told my brother to stand on the plastic sheet that I had laid out in the corner of the front room. This area we named the Tranzportation Zone (we added the zee so it sounded futuristic) and he did as he was told but was a bit upset as he wanted to plug it in himself and take all the glory, but I knew, I could tell, that this machine, once plugged in, was going to explode, or fizzle out in a deluge of hot sparks, or worse, send ten million amps into the poor bastard that plugged it in and I didn't want him to do it, I didn't want him to get hurt. So I got hold of the power cable and with a wink I plugged in that contraption that shouldn't do anything and flicked on the power switch. There was a bright flash. Something was humming, first behind me, then all around me, the hum seemed to be encapsulating me, and then quickly the hum turned physical, it became solid, I could feel it running up and down my body like a thousand ants. My body grew hot and felt alive, like it would catch fire or explode. Then a light filled my eyes, a bright hot-white light, and I could see nothing but the shadows of the things surrounding me, shadows of everything except my brother. My brother wasn't on the Tranzportation Zone anymore. For a split second, a slither of time filled with everything I had ever done, I believed that it had worked, that my brother had been transmogrified into particles and beamed into the television that stood on a glass stand, and he was in there now, lost in the channels, and he was being a cowboy, or a soldier, or a footballer, or anything his heart desired just as long as the programme was on.

Then darkness. A hot, rolling darkness, like being on a ship in a storm in the depths of night with nothing to guide you, not even the stars or the moon.

The next thing I remember was being woken up by my mum. Not in a nice way that you would think a mum would wake up an injured and unconscious son, no, she just slapped me across the face and shook me violently and when I came around all tingly and fuzzy about the head I sat bolt upright, my body aching so much that I screamed. What the hell are you doing? she screamed at me, and I looked around and my brother wasn't on the plastic bag anymore, he was sat in the armchair crying his eyes out and telling our dad that he wasn't sure what had happened and all that added to the delusion that I had that the machine really had worked, we had changed the world forever, we had created a machine that turned you into electricity and transferred you into the tele. The room stank of burnt paper and melting plastic and when I looked around there were clouds of acrid smoke coming from the tele and from the video player and from the plug sockets and from the light fitting and then I realised what I had done and that I hadn't invented a machine that transferred you into the tele, what I had actually invented was a machine capable of frazzling out the entire house and incapacitating anyone that used it.

I thought it was cool. I started to laugh, so my mum slapped me across the face again because she forgot that she should be caring for me and seeing if I was okay like any normal parent would have done instead of being the uncaring soul she had become, instead of caring more about shiny new things more than about her first born son. I don't know if it was something to do with the electric shock I had sustained, but her slaps felt harder, more painful, than any of the others, and my skin maintained a red raw slap stain for weeks and in the bath would sting so much. Mum sent to my room, no dinner, no bedtime story, no nothing, well, nothing apart from being hit again by her when I got caught sneaking downstairs to get a glass of water. I tried to run back up the stairs but she was quick, like she had known I was there all along and she had wound her muscles up like a coil so that when she saw me there on the stairs half coming down and half going up she could flick a switch on the back of her neck and SNAP!! off she sprang in a blur of hate.

From that day on it was like a switch had been flicked inside of my mum and being hit by her became routine, a weekly activity like her Tuesday afternoons where her friends came around for coffee and cake (cake I might add that she never cooked but claimed she did so that she could feel good about herself and raise herself up against her adoring friends). There were incidents of her hitting me prior to that day with the invention, times when I was naughty and sort of deserved to be slapped. I know that doesn't sound right, but that's the way it was. As the bigger brother I expected to be the one that took the strain, to be the one that faced the General when the battle was lost. Through it all my brother was let off, after all it was my fault, I was the one in charge, I was the one who should have known better and not messed things up like I always messed things up. Everything that went wrong, the root cause was always me messing up. And it carried on through our childhood together, I was to blame, whereas he was the gift from God whom did nothing wrong or could do no wrong.

The day after the invention incident, for some reason, perhaps I was jealous that he could entertain himself as he doing, I watched my brother read the TV Guide, it was either the Radio Times or the TV Times, I can't remember which, it may have been both and probably was knowing how my brother was. Those books were my brother's oracle, his font of all his knowledge, and he would read those floppy shiny magazines from cover to cover so that he knew what would happen before it even happened. He didn't like surprises in life, they scared him enough that the thought of something happening out of the blue was enough to freak him out. He also didn't like certain actors or actresses. Even some directors would make him sneer and mark the show with a red cross to remind him to steer clear from such a nightmarish situation. That fortnightly bible would be studied, inhaled, digested, and studied, over and over again, until he was sure he knew every page, every fact or plot that it had to offer. Other boys enjoyed the weekly tales of Spiderman, or Thor, or Hulk, or Batman, or Striker, or Peanuts. But not my brother, his world was the T.V and the TV Guide.

But I'm making him out to be some kind of finger twisting, hidden behind closed curtains recluse. He wasn't. He was like all the other boys of his age except that he liked TV just a bit more than they did and so much so that his love for the A-Team, for Face to be more accurate, bordered on sexual, well, as sexual as an eight year old can make it. He was the same as a boy that loved Gary Lineker or Ian Rush, just different. If he liked the shows then he would become besotted with them like another boy would become besotted with his football team, there was nothing else that mattered when that show was on, the world could be burning around him, his chair could be on fire, Gandalf could be stood in front of him asking him to go on an adventure to Mirkwood, my brother would care not a jot and just carry on watching the tele oblivious to the world around him.

The days and months went on like that, we played, we watched tele, I got the sharp end of mums anger whist he got the soft end of her complicated soul. Dad worked and worked all the hours he could. I can't say much about my father. I didn't know if he knew or didn't know what was going on. I like to think that he didn't know what was going on as if he did, and did nothing about it, then somehow that's worse than her actually doing to me what she did. I can't explain why I feel that, I just do. I didn't see much of my dad, my memories of him are faded, there were good times and then grey times. But he never hit me, never raised his voice to me. In fact, he didn't really do anything to or with me or my brother, but at least he did what he needed to do to keep a roof over our heads and food in our bellies and presents under the Christmas tree and clothes on our backs.

Neither I nor my brother had many friends, we didn't need them, we were brothers, good brothers, tight like toffee, and we were enough for what we needed. We shared a bedroom and even though I was in my teens and he wasn't even into double digits I didn't mind that we had to share. We had fun in that bedroom, playing radio stars, A-Team show, army with Action Man soldiers and Barbie victims. Board games and card games and racing cars and robots and football hero, we played them all, did it all, we fought and we mocked and we laughed and we cried but never did it get nasty or meaningful, we were just boys being boys in a house that didn't care what the hell it was that we did. My father showed some interest, but his head was filled with the next job, with how he was going to afford the next mortgage payment or the next crippling Council Tax bill. And now that I think more of it, as I sit here in the cold forest trying to sleep and jotting all this down in my notepad, he was there, at least when I was little. He would sit with me after mum had been in and did what she felt she had to do. He and I would sit with my brother when it thundered or when the wind blew strong. But it was when I grew older that he grew distant, until he was nothing more than a memory to me, a whisper of a man that existed but not in the world that I or my brother lived in. I would like to know what took him away from us, I know what killed him, killed him before I could ask him so I shall never know. So it fell to me to play the dad role for my brother. I remember sitting at the end of his little bed for ten nights straight after we both watched Gremlins and he was scared out of his little mind. I even took the sheets he had soiled and put them on my bed so that he wouldn't have to face that woman downstairs. My brother was a strange soul, maybe he had something wrong with him, some sort of autism that wasn't diagnosed correctly, I don't know. I think that because anything he liked he would fall in love with, he had to know everything about it. When he discovered sticker albums it was as if nothing else mattered to him apart from collecting the stickers and completing the books and making sure that the stickers were put in dead straight. Jesus, they had to be dead straight. Once, I put in the shiny of the Newcastle United emblem in his football sticker book ever so slightly wonky, outside of the little white boundary lines he so carefully stuck too. God he went ape shit, he had a full on mental breakdown and he tore the sticker book to shreds and shoved it all down the toilet and tried to flush it away and the toilet blocked up that bad that dad had to call in the plumber to get it unblocked and I got a good slapping for that. He got let off, like he always got let off and would keep on doing so as we grew older. We collected Top Trump cards for a summer. Marvel Heroes and Villains was our favourite, though Top Trump Tanks was up there. We had a pack of Super Car Top Trumps which I chose as my little fetish at the time was flashy cars (writing this the thought of a Lamborghini Countach or the Ferrari F40 send tingles down my spine) but my brother didn't like those so we very rarely played with them.

Mum preferred him to me. Though I could never understand why. I was the first child, surely that should have counted for something? I came out the right way too, he came out the sunroof and they had to rid her of what makes her a woman, yet she held no grudge toward him for that. Maybe it's because she knew I wouldn't tell anyone about it, maybe she knew that I feared her and my dad divorcing so much that I would put up with the hitting and the abuse and keep my mouth firmly shut. I loved my brother deeply, and she knew that, so she used it against me. I don't know, and in a way, I don't care. I don't care why she did it, it's more that she did do it. The facts could be laid out before me but it wouldn't matter, it wouldn't change anything, it wouldn't take away the memories or the scars. I know who she really is, what swims deep within her. I laugh about it now, it does seem funny, pathetic almost, what she did, why I let her. For instance, a random day, raining outside, nothing on T.V, the world moving around as it does for kids. Me and my brother are sat in the front room playing Ker-Plunk and in storms my mum, blood shot eyes, shaking hands, and she is screaming at us both, screaming about the half eaten orange that's been left in the fruit bowl that's going mouldy and stinking the place out and what is left there is a complete waste of food and money, her money-money-money-money. Me and my brother knew who was to blame, and so I told her it was me and that I was sorry, I forgot to put it in the bin, I shall go and do it now. But that didn't appease my angry mother. All the hate inside of her towards me came out in screams and shouts of ungratefulness, and of I should know better, and of how I am always causing trouble and that I am no good and I should be glad to live in such a house and my brother starts to cry and she says, Look what you've gone and done now you little shit! and he shakes his head and I can see that he is going to admit to it and I don't want him to that and so I stand up and I want to put right what he has done wrong but for another one of those reasons I don't want to know about my mum decides that just me putting the half eaten orange into the bin and saying sorry isn't a good enough punishment for what I have done and so she pulls me in towards her and from her back produces said half an orange and she rams it against my face and twists it like you would twist an orange in a juicer and the orange juice runs down my face and over my clothes and drips onto the floor and my brother sobs weakly in the corner and my mum is shouting stuff I can't even hear and I can't get away from her because every time I move back she squeezes the orange harder against my face and only when she has had her fill does she push me away and I go stumbling over the sofa and as I fall she laughs and throws the orange at me and then she leaves the room, her excuse for violence sated and a calm descends upon the house that doesn't befit the anarchy that went on before it. My brother came over to me and helped me to my feet and we both headed upstairs and I changed whilst he sat on my bed and watched me, he had stopped crying, but occasionally he would sob and shake his head. The citrus stung my eyes and went on stinging for the rest of the day. He never said thank you for what I did for him, he didn't have to say it, and thinking back I didn't do any of it so that she wouldn't hit him, I did it because if he had of said it was him that had left that orange in the fruit bowl then she wouldn't have believed him and blamed me even more.

I would go on about that time, about that woman and what she did, but you get the point. Not a great childhood, but not the worst there has ever been. It felt nice to get it out there, I haven't told that many people about it and guessing by my surroundings I'm not going to be telling that many more. Even this little notepad will fall on deaf ears I guess, so most of what happened back then will die with me.

A pivotal point in mine and my brother's friendship happened when we were both in secondary school. I was in the last year, and he was in the first year.

This one day at school he was wearing his A-Team t-shirt, his most favourite t-shirt, it had Face on the front and BA's van in the background smashing through a road block in a ball of fiery glory. It was a great T-shirt, I was jealous that he had that, I had just a plain white one with A-Team printed on the right breast. So there he is, all acne and long hair and greasy face and slightly too short trousers that hung slack around the arse but tight around the ankles like a cool kid that didn't quite get it. But he was no cool kid, he just had a mother that didn't want to buy anymore trousers for a kid that was growing up way too fast. Some bigger kids, kids from the year I was in, started to laugh at him, call him names, starting something they knew they could easily finish and he would struggle to keep up with. Looking back he was a bullies dream. They were all finger pointing and flash tongues and smartly kept hair and sweet looking polo shirts and jeans that were so new the Chinese labourer was still attached to them. Maybe he should have done something, my brother that is. Maybe he should have said some stuff back or walked away, anyfucking thing instead of just standing there and letting them go at him like semi-automatic hate machines. Standing there and doing nothing seemed to rile them up further. The names got worse, their threats of what they were going to do to him grew in ferocity, up until their hate took the only natural course it could and they turned violent and the words of hurt became fists that flew and kicks that stung. That's when he decided that he should get out of there. Run in to those hills that Iron Maiden sang about.

They charged at him. Charged like a squad of hate filled soldiers head first into battle. That is when he finally fled, but that got them going even more. Pack animals on a hunt. I was hidden around the corner, behind one of the catering buildings, where the bushes grew thick, and there were sheets of corrugated steel over our heads, and I was well away from the disapproving glares of the teachers. At that precise moment I was burning my finger on a joint, and some girl from the all-girls school had my other hand up her skirt and I was finger deep in her snatch. She was smiling and writhing whilst I squirrelled my finger up there and then all I see is my brother come charging through where we were standing and he was dodging bushes and fallen leaves and rocks and he saw me and saw what I was doing and he kind of smirked as he rushed by, his long hair flowing like a Greek god. On his face was etched the look of a boy in fear, but at the same time I am sure that he was laughing.

He screamed, SHIT HELP ME, as he went flying by and I called out, STEVE OVER HERE, but before I could take my finger out of dumbshit Doris or whatever her name was and ask Steve what the hell he was doing the six bigger kids went hurtling by and I quickly put two and two together and ended up with a result that sent me flying head first into a suspension from school and a criminal record for the next five years.

They had managed to corner Steve behind the bin sheds, like a fox on the rough end of a hunt. Steve was panicking as the boys circled and spat at him. He hadn't resigned himself to the beating, though he was terrified, looking manically everywhere to see if there was some way out, knowing all the time that there wasn't. Two of the six were going at him with punches and kicks by the time I had turned up and Steve was shielding his head from the kicks. One lad saw me, he was acting as the lookout for the rest of his gang, a freckled little ratshit squirt, he bellowed to his buddies that I was there. They all knew me, knew of my reputation, but that didn't stop them from beating up my little brother. The ones not fully invested in destroying my brother's life scarpered pretty quickly and I let them run by me without a second glance. I had eyed my targets at that point and I slung my backpack to the floor and rolled up my sleeves and before I knew what I was actually doing I had pulled both of them off of my brother and had already smashed them to the floor and was kicking and kicking and kicking at them as they were down and I could feel my brother trying to pull me back, trying with force and screams to make me stop, but I couldn't stop what I was doing, I wouldn't stop, the dirty little shitstabbers. I was making them pay, they don't mess with me and my family. I had to protect him, my mum wouldn't, and my dad at that point was no good to anyone so it was up to me.

It was up to me to keep this family safe, to keep us all together. Especially me and my brother, because we were brothers, tight, tight like toffee, and nothing was getting in the way of that, not them or my mum.

It took three teachers to stop me. One of them, Mr Lloyd the RE teacher, I smashed in the face with my elbow and busted his nose, but that was nothing to what I had done to the ones beating up my brother. One of the bullies never came back to school. That was Karl Simms. He didn't die, but a punctured lung takes some time to heal and by the time he was alright by his age he should have been in college but wasn't. The other, Justin Kilbride, he did come back to school but he didn't say much mostly due to the pins and wires and screws and metal bars holding his face together. After several visits to the dentists he ended up with two full sets of dentures. I didn't get the others back, the ones that ran away that is. I was a slow learner but I knew that by going after them meant that I wouldn't be able to protect my little brother anymore, I would be banged up for sure, and it was touch and go for a while, whether or not I would end up in prison.

But after that day, nobody tried it on again with him, or me, and we were left alone for the most part.

But now it seems as though that that didn't really matter to Steve. What happened that day changed Steve. Maybe it was a growth spurt, perhaps he was destined to be the bigger one out of the two of us, it doesn't matter, what matters is, is that it was the last time Steve ever needed my help, the last time he ever needed his big brother to step in and help out and that hurt me. Yeah, the more I think about it the more I realise that what I became to him isn't what being a big brother is supposed to be. But then again, a little brother isn't supposed to betray you either, so, in retrospect, fuck him and the man he became.

We grew up, but not apart. Our relationship seemed fragile, there would always be something between us that neither of us knew what it was, but it was always there, hiding deep in our dispirited conversations, hunkered down in slow nights out, and ruining things that were once pristine between us. Now I know what it was, and if I had known then what I knew now then perhaps it would have been different. I'd like to think that it would have been, but to dwell on the past and wish things never happened is a mugs game.

That fragility stuck with us through the years that followed. We were still brothers, we cried together at the birth of my daughter, and for brief moments it seemed as though it would get back on track. We leant on each other when our father died of a heart attack and were both there at our mothers' side, and even though I didn't want to be there, I could see that he needed me. Perhaps need is too strong a word, but I had to be there for him nonetheless. Whether or not he wanted me there or not.

He had a string of girlfriends. On that string were pegs that were other girlfriends, or wives of happily married husbands that he tempted into his bed. What I mean to say is that he fucked anything that pretty much moved, be it taken or not. I didn't like that about him, it wasn't my place to say anything about it, but that doesn't mean I had to be happy about it neither. I don't understand the reasoning behind his choices. I am a one woman kind of guy, if you don't want to stick with that one then get out, don't ruin it for someone else and wreck their lives.

There was this one girlfriend though, Laura was her name, and I liked her. Not in that way. I liked her because:

a) my wife liked her, and

b) because she calmed my brother down.

She kept him in line, eased him off the drink and the drugs (not that it was over the top but just because it was starting to get the better of him) and, more importantly, I think I liked her because they both were in love. It was an obvious love, all kisses and cuddles and random gifts and lunches and dinners out together and they liked the same stuff as each other and were just... I don't know.... just good together, complimentary, like salt and vinegar on chips, or brown sauce with a bacon sandwich, some things are just meant to be. What they had was a persistent first year of a relationship, he and Laura seemed to keep going on like that. It got a bit stomach churning from time to time, that's jealousy I suppose, you wish your stagnant relationship was like theirs and you were touching and kissing and screwing whenever physically possible. You couldn't be around them both for too long without feeling that your own relationship was a complete pile of shit. I was even starting to like him again, the relationship we had when we were ten or whatever was starting to come back, the fragility that was once there, like thin ice on an early winter lake, was thickening, less prone to cracks, so now it felt solid, perhaps one could even put some weight on it.

So I put some weight on it when he needed me to. I leant him five grand. Big old chunk of money that. I was a maniac with the loan too, I didn't run it past the old life organiser. Just went to the bank, drew it out, and handed it over. He didn't have a proper job, he was an apprenticing plumber. He worked hard, was learning the trade, doing well, and the future was looking good for him and Laura. A couple of years and he would be able to pay me back and I was okay with that, not to sound too up my own arse, but I didn't really need the money at that point as me and the wife were doing well and everything for us was working out.

The money was to pay for a trip to Paris. Travelling by Eurostar, 1st Class. Four days all Five Star, money no object, Champagne breakfasts and roses by the tonne. Trips up the Eifel Tower and around the Arc De Triumph and down that street with all the shops. Steve's plan was to pop the question to Laura and then spend the next four days deep in each other's pants whilst the glory of Paris loomed ever bright outside their bastard expensive hotel window.

He wanted to marry her, so how could I say no to a loan. We had no dad at that point and mum was flat broke. I felt obliged to lend him the money, as if it was some kind of maternal thing I had to do to make up for my families shortfalls. Maybe I was doing it to make up for whatever it was that happened between us. I still ponder that now, out here in the forest I have time to ponder a lot of things. I doubt I will ever know the answer and he isn't here to help me out. The more I think about it, yeah, I guess it was nice of me to loan him the money, I wanted what was best for him and getting married to Laura, making a home, was a start. He was my little brother, he was Face and I was Hannibal. I wasn't buying back his friendship, but then again the more I think about the loan the more I see it as an accomplice to my need to have him back in my life.

I drew the money out of the bank in hard cash. I handed it over easily, easier than I thought I would've handed over five big ones. I left him in town with a wallet full of cash. What could possibly go wrong?

Five days later there came a knocking at the door. Laura was stood there, soaked to the bone, makeup smeared across her face, and her eyes were as red as tomatoes and as puffy as a Naff-Naff jacket.

She blabbed something, I feared the worse, I had that instant gut wrenching feeling you get when you know something bad is about to happen, or has, happened. But Steve was okay, he's okay for now, something something sob sob snuffle snuffle waffle waffle sob sob tears snot and garbled nonsense and nose wipes with the back of her drenched jacket sleeve. It didn't cross my mind to ask her in even though it was hammering it down and she was getting more and more soaked with every passing second. We both stood there, me nice and dry with a little tickle of a warm breeze from the central heating wafting up my trouser leg whilst Laura stood outside shivering and blubbering like a drenched street cat. She kept looking past me as she blabbed, telling me that Steve was a bastard, a bastard-man-bastard and he aint no good and she is done with him.

It wasn't until Julie (that's my wife) came to the door to see what was going on and she invited Laura in with a shake of her head and a disapproving look toward me that I realised that I should have done that about five minutes previous. I haven't a clue what I was thinking about, why I didn't let her in, perhaps I didn't want to know the truth of what was going on. Maybe I was just being a jerk. Still, we were all inside now, in the kitchen, and there was Julie and Laura, arm in arm, heads upon shoulders, and Julie was patting Laura's head and saying it's going to be okay and furious head shaking from Laura, no its not, it's all over I can't believe he did it, and Julie was all like, I know, I know, it's okay I'm sure we can get this sorted and that's how the two of them went on for some time; Julies heartfelt words of encouragement followed by Laura's broken hearted words of love lost. There are times in life where a man realises that he is out of his depth, that what he is and what he brings to the party are the complete opposites of what is required. This moment was most definitely a no fly zone for me. They were bonding in a very comfortable way for them but a rather uncomfortable way for me. I felt like a cocksman on standby at a fuck party, one that won't catch a break and will be left without a buddy to hump, just used up tissues and towels to clean up and to make sure to turn the lights off at the end of the day.

I put the kettle on.

It boiled whilst they stood in the middle of the kitchen, deeply involved in each other's embrace, both sharing feelings and emotions I think us men have not the ability to produce or understand.

When the kettle clicked and the vapour rose I made three cups of tea, each one the same; two sugars and a whisper of milk. I could tell Laura didn't like it, she sat at the breakfast bar wearing a sour grimace with each sip, but I didn't think to ask if she wanted something else. To be honest, I couldn't get a word in edgeways. She and Julie were bang at it. Turns out, little brother had been up to his old tricks again only this time the girl he was seeing didn't know about Laura and didn't get that she was a just a fuck buddy and so this morning she had turned up on Laura's doorstep, little travel suitcase in tow no doubt filled with thongs, frilly this and saucy that.

Oh my God's and what a bastard cat calls filled the kitchen, they helped stir my tea and made me blink hard. This was not a place for me to be but where else could I go? I felt obliged to be there, to stand up for my brother if the time came. But it didn't. Or there was no standing up for him. And then the real hammer blow came. He had taken his new side project away for a long weekend to Amsterdam. This new bit of snuff had shown Laura the photos, the love bites, and then went on to detail the addiction to Ketamine they both had, lovely.

I was stood in Fuzzy-Brain-Town for a moment or two thinking about how it was possible for my little brother to have gathered together enough money to go away for a weekend to Amsterdam and smash it up on beer and drugs and then oh my, it hit me like a sip of Absinth. It was a shit inducing reminder. A wake up call reminiscent of a tidal wave of concrete poured all over me and a fist shoved up my arse for good measure. If I had the ability to turn to liquid and pour out of that room I would have done so and never reformed myself again until this had all blown over because some part of me, the survival aspect of a man in a relationship, knew where the blame was going to end up. I tried to shut down the part of me that wanted to tell them about the loan, but....

Words came out of my mouth like thick toffee. I told them about the money I had lent him. About the engagement, about Paris, and about the Five Star travel and hotel room with views of the river, of the tower, and all that other stuff that goes on in Paris. I was bigging up the whole idea as if it could still happen. Laura looked as if she was going to throw her guts up. She had the look of a woman who thought she couldn't be any more hurt than she was already and then BAM! have some of that you stupid cunt for believing anything my brother ever told you.

Shockingly, they turned upon me once I had told my small part of the story. I had to explain to my accusers why I had leant Steve the money, why I didn't ask my wife first. I told them I had my reasons, I took sips of my tea whilst I reeled off our lack of parentage and that he was my brother and I wanted to help but I could see what I was saying was falling on deaf ears, or ears that listened but didn't give a shit as they had their new target in sight. Those two women had a victim close at hand.

Turns out this whole affair thing my brother was having was my fault.

It's always been my fucking fault.

A year or so later I was alone in my house. The wife was out, I think she had gone to her mums for a couple of days and had taken our daughter with her, nothing bad, just visiting the family and I wasn't invited, not sure why and I never asked. I had the place all to myself so I did what any normal bloke would do in that situation and went hunting for my porn stash so that I could wank myself into a stupor and then fall asleep on the sofa watching the cricket. She hadn't been gone more than thirty minutes and I had half the wardrobe strewn across the bedroom floor in search for the good stuff, the hunter gatherer of the modern age, seeking the disks, my secret disks. It's not that I didn't have much sex, we had it maybe once or twice a week, but sometimes a man just needs to masturbate. Simple as that. We are not dissatisfied with you, we don't want what we chuck one out over, we simply have the ability to do this and so we do it.

I found the disks, eventually, they were hidden between the pages of a book. I remember there being four disks, but in my hand I held five. Four of the five were labelled something ridiculous like Bruce Lee triple, Jet Lee double feature, and a few other martial artists who had made films. The fifth disk was nameless. Its lack of a title intrigued me, a magical porn disk. Oh the possibilities.

I went into the bathroom, grabbed a towel, and went back to the bedroom. I took the strawberry flavoured last longer lube out of the lower draw, that point in my pleasuring myself timeline I had developed a penchant for lubrication whilst I stroked, it felt more gentlemanly, less dirty. Naked in an instant, I whacked the nameless DVD into the player, placed the towel neatly onto the bed, and laid atop it with the lube ready to go. A tradition all men have done and understand, it's not dirty, it's not to be frowned upon, it happens, we have an urge and it can take us at any point during the day.

The movie started. It was grainy, amateurish, and I had no memory of it.

We are in a hotel room. Long green curtains, it's a Holiday Inn. The bed is made, there is an extra sheet on top of the bed much like my towel is covering the bed I am on now. The camera turns, the man in the mirror is erect and ready to go, he doesn't have a pornstar body, he's a bit podgy and has an overly hairy chest. There is a knock on the hotel door, the camera turns and the woman says room service behind the door and the man walks to the door and opens it and there is a woman in a French maids outfit holding a tray with nothing on it. You can't see her face, the camera isn't at the right angle, but to be honest who gives a shit what she looks like. The outfit is too small, tits popping out, tight around the waist. The guy says come on in and the camera follows the maid and it tilts to see that she has no pants on underneath that costume and her bare arse is showing and it's a lovely arse. I smear some lube on my hardon. The man holding the camera asks her to place the tray on the side and she does but leans over way too much so that her pussy is showing through the gap in her legs. The man puts his hand there, inserts a finger and the woman moans and then what happens in all porn films happens and the woman is on the bed and the man is on top of her and they are fucking and it's a good top down view and those tits are wobbling and her moaning is really getting me off and I wank myself quick and hard and the lube doesn't really do much and I cum all over the show, the towel getting some but my hand and chest gets a drenching and a few seconds later the man is doing the same but he is doing it over the woman dressed up as a maid but by that time I am wiping myself clean, ready to get up and go to the bathroom. Then I hear a familiar voice, she's telling the man to turn the camera off, to stop filming. And the man has a familiar voice too, and he is laughing a familiar laugh, and my heart and my gut drops and I turn and look at the tele and there on the screen, reflected in the wardrobe mirror of that shitty little hotel room is stood my wife and she's covered in glossy creamy spunk and she's all sweaty and more satisfied looking than I have ever seen her and stood next to her is my brother and he is holding the camera and small beads of spunk drip off of his semi hard cock. Then the screen goes black, turns to static fuzz and I am stood there naked, with a flaccid, dripping penis, and I'm holding a lubed up cum stained towel not really knowing what to do or where to do it. My chest fills all of a sudden full of air, air that won't come out so I can't take any more in. My stomach churns and churns. Legs turning to jelly, head spinning. Vomit sprays out of my mouth, over the towel, over the floor, over my feet.

It must be a trick, my mind playing games on me, after all everything is a lie; it's all a twist on what is really out there. I gathered myself together, the smell of semen and sick hovered around me, but I had to know. The floor is deadly slippery, there are chunks like thick soup squelching between my toes, but I have to know. Rewinding and playing back the last ten seconds of the video I can plainly see that this isn't a trick and now it all makes sense. Those tits, that arse, they looked so good because I already love those bits because they are my wife's, they are the reasons why I married the cheap whore lying two timing mother fucking cunt. No, no, she's not that, she is my one and only, the one I married and promised to love until the end of all things. Her moans got me off because they always got me off the two timing mother fucking slag whore bitch shit head. All I can see as the moments fly by is her being finger fucked by my brother, images of her and him replacing me in everything I have ever done with my wife. My daughter, is she really mine, the doubts make me vomit down a side wall because somehow I am now dressed and am running down the streets, barging through people, hitting and bouncing off lampposts and bins, my legs are burning, my feet ache in the over tightened trainers, I can't get the image out of my head of them together, and they are doing it on my bed and they are laughing as he smears his smeggy end all over my pillow....

And then I am stood outside my brothers shitty little flat above a shitty little shop that no one gives a fuck about. I knock, well, I hammer on the door and he opens it and there he is. My little brother, my little brother who fucked my wife. My darling beautiful wife. He doesn't see how fever mad I am.

Hey there big bro, what's up?

He doesn't see the shovel I hold behind my back, just smiles and walks away like he usually does and he doesn't know what is going to happen because he doesn't know that I have found the video of him spraying his dirty filthy hot love spunk all over my fucking bitch whore cunting wife who I love so much it hurts. The woman I have a daughter with, my two rocks, my two bloody fucking most important things in the world and he's gone and ruined it like he has ruined dozens of other relationships.

I punched my brother right on the back of the head. I had a little run up and everything and though it hurt my hand it felt good to hit him like I did. He went down and hard, all legs and arms and he hit the floor with a satisfying thud, like a box of paper hitting a smooth concrete warehouse floor. He deserved it, but maybe I could have hit him face to face and not on the back of the head so that he had a chance to defend himself. But if I'd have given him a chance he would have beat the shit out of me. He'd grown up strong you see, and that's my fault too I suppose.

And so there he was lying prone on the floor. I don't know if he was unconscious or not. Blood was trickling out of a small cut on the side of his head. I stood over him and hated everything about him. Hated all the lies, hated him for being the one that didn't get hit by my shit of a mother. Hated him for ruining my life, for taking my wife and daughter away from me.

I kicked him to death right there and then. Couldn't stop myself even though I was thinking to myself that this was wrong. But he shouldn't have fucked my wife. He just shouldn't have done that. I didn't even give him a chance to deny the act, to say it was a lie, or that I was mistaken or some other Hollywood type get of jail free remark, I just went at him with my fists and my feet and then when remembering what I had brought with me I smashed his face in with the shovel while he lay dead or dying on the floor. Escape from that Dillinger.

By the time I had finished there was nothing much left of him but a body covered in cuts and bruises and a head that looked more like a watermelon that had been blown apart by a grenade. I cleaned the shovel, wiped it down, and then made sure I cleaned all the surfaces that I had touched so as to not leave any traces of me being there. I was breathing hard, I didn't feel any remorse or sadness for what I had done. I felt a strange relief wash over me, like all at once I could breathe again, and the air I breathed was fresh and free of the poison that used to fill my lungs. I took his wallet, took the spare money he kept in the pot above his cupboards in the kitchen and I took his watch. I bought that watch for him, cost me the best part of two hundred quid, so I was having that back. The rest of the flat I left untouched.

When I got home I put the shovel back into the shed, covered it in dirt, put my clothes in the wash and set it to boil and put on fresh clothes and took a shower and then cleaned up the bedroom and then put all the disks back where I had found them, except one, the one disk that has been a ruination to everything that I have ever loved.

I walked out of that house with nothing but what I was wearing and my wallet.

Acts of a mad man? I guess so. But are you telling me that you wouldn't have done the same thing if you were in my position. Imagine if it were you that has just wanked over your wife getting fucked. Go on, picture your wife or girlfriend or husband or boyfriend, basically picture your most significant other half being fucked by your brother or your sister or your mum or your dad. Go on, do it, just for a couple of seconds, I dare ya...

There isn't any more story until you have thought about it...

Go on...

There is only going to be full stops until you think about it...

...

...

...

...

...

..............................that's it, there it is. Well done.

Horrible feeling, right? I bet you feel sick and a bit dirty and angry for something that hasn't even happened. Now you go and times that feeling by a number so large it's bigger than how many millimetres there are to the moon (that's 3844030000000mm FYI) and even that doesn't come close to how much anger, how much hate, how much self-loathing, how much rage I had building up inside of me.

So:

(Q) Is what I did an act of a mad man?

(A) You tell me.

I started drinking about three hours after killing my brother. I don't know if I had ever planned on going back home, of showing my face again. I think I did, I just don't know. I hit the bottle hard. Hard enough to never return home. I just left, never said goodbye. All I did was leave the nameless DVD on the bed with a picture of me and my wife and our daughter that we had taken at Euro Disney next to it. So I suppose, based on that, I never did plan on going back.

I left my daughter. That was the hardest part, but obviously not too hard. I convinced myself that she wasn't even mine. She was his, it was all a lie, and now that two bit slut can deal with the tears of a child that won't understand where Daddy has gone. The drink and the prostitutes I screwed and the friends I made helped convince me that she wasn't mine. I dreamed of my daughter, dreams that told me that she was mine, stop being so stupid, of course she is yours. But those dreams faded into a drink and drugs fog and then all I thought about was the next bottle, the next needle, and where I was going to stay and not freeze to death. Drink and drugs and pointlessness do that to you. It's quite incredible how quickly you can become addicted to something when you put your mind to it. And on the back of that it's incredible how quickly the mind can forget things if it has something else to worry about, especially if that other thing is survival and a hit.

I did vow, with each passing day, with each passing sip, that I would quit this life that this would be my last bottle, my last God damned drink, my last hit, but I knew that that was total bullshit. I was surrounded by enablers. Best buddies with fellow liquid purists that could survive off of cheap hotdogs, packets of peanuts, expired gift cards, vinegar wine, drain whisky, knife point seductions, cold junk, hot fetid junk, cock sucking, butthole surfing, wretched friendships, jilted lovers and anything else the streets dragged up and offered up as a prize.

The trouble was, I enjoyed it. All of it.

At first it was an escape, a way out, then after a while it became habitual, like brushing your teeth, or reading the morning paper, or walking the same route to work, you do these things every day, unconsciously act them out with your mind's eye closed, and that's what drinking became to me, an unconscious escape from the torrential stupidity of being alive. I was no longer mixed, like salt in sourdough, into the hustle of everyday life.

My days went by like yours. I had twenty-four little hours as you had twenty-four hours. The sun came up and then went down. The moon floated over my head at probably the same time as it went over yours. Rain soaked my clothes, mist covered me like a fleeting blanket, the wind whistled in my ear like a far off lover. But unlike you I sat and watched it all happen with telescopic x-ray eyes that saw everything, witnessed it all in quantum clarity. I didn't just let it slide over me whilst I confined my life with worries about the TV, or the music I wanted to listen to, or what I was going to have for tea, or how I was going to pay rent, or what will Martha think of me now that I have done my hair and look so different because I want to be like the thin vacant minded stick women on the front of the glossy death magazines. I don't care about stocks or the local football team. I couldn't give two shits about my hair, about the latest film release, or what the tabloids said. Fuck you and your lives. Get out and smell the fresh grass and think thoughts all those other human robots wouldn't dream of thinking.

I saw the world raging.

I felt the warm breath of summer as it turned cold and became a chilly golden whisper.

I witnessed the passing of time, the interaction of life with our new mechanical world.

I glazed over at the wonders of nature as it toiled in the shadows.

I caught sight of the ticking clock.

I admired the cat for catching the rat.

I watched the life of a butterfly, all so short, but oh so beautiful.

I saw survival.

I saw death.

I grimaced at desperation and applauded determination.

The city shadows became my playground. The city became my front room, my TV, my bedroom, and my garden. Skyscrapers were my trees. Telephone cables stretched out before me like washing lines. Streetlights were my reading lights, turning daily newspapers an orange fluorescent glow. People rushed from here to there whilst I sailed past in a perpetual slow motion of ecstasy. I was untouchable by you, I could avoid the everyday reality that you nailed yourself to. You wonder how I can survive when you walk through me and see me four cans into my day and its only 8:30 in the morning but I look up at you and wonder similarly how the hell you can survive with that giant monkey on your back taking half your life away whilst you go on knowing all the while that it is there but you don't do anything about it. Your paid work is slavery. Monkey's being crushed by bigger monkeys for only a small sniff of the nut that everybody wants but only a select few get. All that you suffer is all that you know. Well fuck that.

During this time I knew I had to stop drinking. It was pretty fucking obvious. But why the hell should I? At that point I had nothing to gain from stopping. Those around me had already given up on me, those so-called friends you staple yourself to in hopes that their lives rub against yours and by doing this rubbing it somehow would cause a friction that transcends all the bullshit that you have to put up with. But that never transpires, the friendships never come along to save you, and they move on with their perfect lives and leave you behind, like they left me behind, drowning in my own misery, knee deep in shit, balls deep in the junk, reading half torn newspapers, soaked novels, graffiti poems.

There were events, moments as it where, during my stint as a drunk which I shall treasure and never forget. They are as much a part of me as my time spent in college or university, so I shouldn't let them go. I can remember them all as if they happened only yesterday. It defies logic, but then again, we live in a world which has never followed the logical rules we would like it to.

Life. It creeps up on you, doesn't it? It stalks you, waits till your back is turned, then KAPOW it smashes you in the back of the head with a length of pipe, then it scurries for cover as if it was never there, it does leave witnesses, but somehow those witnesses have always had it worse than you and what you have gone through pales so much in comparison that you are forgotten and the world moves forever on. For some this attack comes later in life, perhaps a mid-life crisis that makes you consider all that has gone on before you and you realise you have accomplished nothing and the rest of your life will be just as eventful. You panic, buy a convertible sports car, go to the gym to bulk up not realising that you look like a total dick in doing so. Or maybe it's when you have kids or grand kids. Those little bundles of joy might make you scan the rest of your life and make you realise that you are going to be nothing but memories to them, fading memories to those that know you and all that you have accomplished will slowly rot and become dust that another future life cleans from the mantelpiece, swept aside like a chewing gum wrapper. We are all made of stardust they say, they also say that we all will one day return to the earth to be consumed at a particle level back into the world and then re-birthed as something else, perhaps a part of an acorn, or the antennae on a bug, maybe the stinger on a wasp, or the dew on a mint leaf, or the drunk on a street corner.

I remember trying to explain all this to a woman slumped in the alleyway with me one day. We are both smashed out of our nuts but still semi-with-it. I think she's alive. I'm sure there's movement behind her eyes, though that could just be the remnants of her brain pulsing with electricity before it fades. We both started drinking together about a year ago, neither of us have looked back since that day, we were drunks before we met and have continued that trade together. Her name is Kaleidoscope, but that doesn't really matter. We have sex, quick and uneventful, but I guess I enjoy it otherwise why would I be here with her? I hope that if she were attacked I would try and defend her, but in all likelihood I would stand back and watch and wait for them to be done so that the day could go on and I could sit down and rest. She isn't as pretty as my ex-wife, she isn't anything like her to be honest. And that's the attraction isn't it? When you get burnt by fire you don't stick your dick back in it.

Me and Kaleidoscope, we are both sat in the back of an alleyway and are not a part of the world that goes on over there, where you are. We have distanced ourselves away from where you are, we sometimes venture in to your world but soon realise we are not welcome there and we scramble out before the heckling starts. You see us, don't you, hiding in the shadows, and most of the time you pay us little attention.

So I tell her one day that life crept up on me, showed me its true colours, one Sunday afternoon when I was seven and all blue eyes and blonde hair and toy cars and lollipops and terraced houses with a garden covered in grass and super summers and video fused weekends and gaming nights with friends and jumpers for goal posts and torn jeans and tight fitting t-shirts with faded X-Wings printed on them and my little brother and me playing games and being best friends best friends never ever break friends. During those hazy days I realised that my mum was a cunt. Not just a run-of-the-mill, can't play with your toys until you've eaten your dinner type of cunt, I'm talking a full bore hyper dynamite titanium encased type of cunt. I was fed and watered, dressed in nice clothes, clean and tidy for the most part, so there was nothing for the authorities to get concerned over, not that there was much of that going on anyway. I didn't know the word cunt back then, but I know that if I had of known it I would have thought her one by the time this particular day was done.

So anyway, this Sunday afternoon had been the usual type of day. My dad had been in the garden shed, working like he always worked when he was home from his actual day job. My brother was four or five and was doing whatever four or five year olds got up to. I had been out playing with mates and was high on Cola and sweets and the joys of a seven year olds life. I came home exhausted, ready for dinner.

Woch-you been up to? mum asks me, even though I am carrying a sponge football and I am covered in grass stains and I am sure I told her I was going out to play football down the park.

Playing football. Where's dad?

Her eyes are black dots on a sheet of the purest, whitest paper, her mouth as tight as an elastic band that's ready to snap, In the shed, and she looks at my shorts and then at me and it's as if this is the first time she has ever seen me. Like I wasn't there before. Where have you been all day? said with a noticeable slur. She had to lean against the wall in the hallway. There was a painting of HMS Hermes, coming back from the Falklands a battered war hero, on the wall and her shoulder brushed against it and I thought it was going to drop, but it didn't.

Playing football down the park. When's tea?

She shook her head, Why can't you just be like your little brother? He's good and doesn't get his best shorts dirty. Christ, you're just like your fucking father, out there, in that bloody shed doing whatever he is doing and not here with me and being with me, you both treat this place like a hotel.

I didn't really know what I thought at that point so I said, These are my old ones, mum.

Don't you tell me what's new and what's not. I know what's new and those are your new ones and they are ruined, covered in grass and mud and all you can do is stand there and lie to me and tell me they aint new. You're just like your dad, lies, lies, lies, and more lies all the time. Fullashit the both of you. Think I'm an idiot, treat me like a fucking spastic. Well I've had enough of it. ENOUGH OF IT, and her right hand came flying out and for some reason I thought that she was going to cuddle me and tell me that it's all okay and that she was only playing so I leant into that swing and when her open palm hit the side of my face I didn't scream or cry or fall to the floor, I just stood there, not reacting to what happened, just stunned I suppose. I could feel the side of my head heating up, there was a pain bouncing around, but for some reason it wasn't connecting with my brain. I later discovered that Pink Floyd summed it up with two words; Comfortably Numb, and they were right. Being hit by your mum is a feeling unlike anything I have ever felt, it felt both loving and hateful. Caressed with a shock. Loved with hate.

I'm sorry, mum, I told her, though for what I didn't know and still don't.

Go to your room, you're not sorry at all, you're never sorry, just like your bastard father, he goes off out to here and there with her, I know he does and he's never bloody sorry about how he treats me and what he has to put me through.

Her eyes were too bloodshot for me to tell what was going on and so I did what I was told, though I didn't understand why or what was happening and so I walked up the stairs and could feel those bloodshot eyes watching me every step of the way and I am sure that those eyes wanted me to fall down the stairs, she wanted me to hurt myself so that she didn't have to waste any more energy on me.

But I didn't fall.

I simply opened my bedroom door and closed it softly behind me and I didn't cry, I didn't think I had to cry.

I sat on the edge of my bed after taking my shorts off. I held them tight against my stomach. They stunk of wet grass and I am sure they smelled of wee as well even though I am sure I didn't wet myself. I had a little wash basin in my room. My dad had built it so that I could learn some self-reliance. There was a mirror above the sink, a stool below it. I could see myself in that mirror. A little boy sat on the end of his bed. He-Man was reflected backwards, my Return of the Jedi poster seemingly written in Russian. I wasn't surprised to see that there were tears running down my cheeks though I thought I wasn't crying. The side of my head was bright red. It was a colour I would become used to during my childhood.

I decided to clean my shorts. I was a kid, what the hell else was I supposed to do? Stuff seems hazy when you look back, all choices made must have been for a reason, childish reasons that weren't childish when you made them and seemed honest and the right thing to do, I mean come on, my mum was angry at me and I wanted to make it better so cleaning my trousers seemed the best option, plus I didn't feel like playing with my toys and I didn't know what my mum was capable of, plus I didn't understand that sometimes no matter what you do some people want to watch the world burn.

I didn't know if those shorts were my new ones or my old ones. I was seven for fucks sake, how the hell am I supposed to know what are my new clothes and what are my old ones? They were in the wardrobe that morning, so I put them on. When I had dirty washing the next day it was clean again. Magic. I knew clothes were bought for me, but so too were toys and toys were much more important than a pair of socks or Puma King Tracksuit bottoms.

I stood by my sink in just my Thundercat pants and plain grey t-shirt and tried to wash my dirty shorts. It didn't do any good. I didn't know what I was doing, it was getting worse and worse, and so I scrubbed them harder with a block of soap and the scolding water made my skin turn red. The water was so hot and my skin so sore that I wanted to stop but couldn't and the soap was doing nothing but irritating my skin and then I started to cry harder and I gritted my teeth tight and I wished, Christ was I wishing, that the dirt would come out and run down the plug hole and my shorts would be clean again and not ruined. These were my bestest shorts after all and they had to be clean for doing all those bestest things in that my mum cared so much about.

And then my bedroom door opened and in walked my mum and she was holding my little brother close to her.

What are you doing?

Cleaning my shorts.

Why?

Because I got them dirty playing football and they are my best ones. I'm sorry mum.

You don't have to be sorry, she said smiling and tilting her head, and now it was my turn to look at her as if I had never seen her before. Her glossy blood shot eyes were gone. The twitching swaying woman that had slapped me across the face was no more and instead my real mum had taken her place and all that had happened perhaps I had dreamed.

Those aren't your new shorts, silly. What made you say that? And how did you get that bruise on your cheek, did the football hit you? Yes, that's it, the football hit you didn't it. You have to be more careful, sweetheart.

I dropped the shorts on the floor, Yeah, the ball hit me. Is that what I should tell dad, that the ball hit me?

Probably for the best. Now put on your pyjamas, it's time for tea. I made you your favourite, macaroni cheese, and she left with my baby brother and the world floated in front of my eyes and I stood on the wet shorts and didn't know what to do or who I was or who she was.

Slowly, I got into my PJ's. My head hurt from crying, my hands ached from scrubbing, my cheek from being hit by the ball throbbed a hot pain. I didn't want to go downstairs. Not because I was scared of my mum. Not because I was afraid of being hit again. By then I had convinced myself that it was the football that had marked my face and that I hadn't been careful as she had asked. I didn't want to go downstairs because I hated macaroni cheese. It was not my favourite and she, my mum, knew that. But maybe she had forgotten. Yeah, that was probably it, I thought to myself, she has forgotten, she has so much to do and it must be hard to look after me and my little brother and my dad and the house and so I went downstairs and I smiled and told my dad it was the football that hit me when he asked about the bruise on my face and I ate that macaroni cheese and pretended to love every mouthful and smiled at my mum when she smiled at me. Happy families. Comfortably numb happy families sat around a table for some family-time together, happy little pigs eating from a ceramic trough.

How I wasn't sick I don't know.

Now I just think about what a complete bitch my mum had been that Sunday. She knew I hated macaroni cheese and yet she made me eat it. She made me eat all of it and watched me as I put mouthfuls of that gloopy sticky yellowy puss shit into my mouth. I could see in her eyes the punishment I would get if I didn't eat it and I didn't want to face that.

I finish my little story to the woman sat next to me. Kaleidoscope hasn't said anything, I don't even know if she was listening as I bled my heart dry to her. Her face was pale and a twinkle of concern flickered in my heart. She looked so vulnerable, she was vulnerable I suppose. But I was thirsty and the world was becoming a little too real, so it was time to move on. Well, when I say move on, what I really mean is to go down to the off licence and buy another two quid bottle of cider and then come back and drink it and then maybe she will wake up and we can find something to eat and somewhere to sleep. I told her what I was going to do and she said nothing, she kept staring blankly at the wall. I looked at that wall, briefly, and apart from a slightly off coloured brick, there was nothing about that wall that was interesting.

I walked away. I just walked away.

When I returned to the alleyway, the sky a pale pink hue of a child's soft toy, Kaleidoscope was still sleeping with her eyes open which I have seen people do when they are on the nod and their veins are soaked with H. Her top was covered with sick and her face was bruised and battered and there was a small cut beneath her eye that didn't trickle blood because the blood had clotted and scabbed up. Her pockets had been turned out and a rat had started to nibble on her bare foot which wasn't bare when I had left her. Her other foot was still wearing a shoe. I took a glance at my wristwatch, it was Sunday, which I am sure is wrong as it was Thursday when I told her about my mum, it was a Thursday when I had left for a drink.

Shaking her body I called her name and told her to wake up. Nothing but a scurrying rat and the stench of vomit and stale piss and something that smelt metallic drifted up from her as well, a smell that I am familiar with but have tried to forget. It was then that I realised that before, back in the past, way before the drink and a long time before she was raped and assaulted by her uncle or some other douche bag, Kaleidoscope was a good looking girl, full of life and love and freedom and maybe she could have married a doctor or a lawyer or some such a hob-nob and have had a big house and a train full of kids and an Audi or maybe a Merc, and that maybe she wasn't called Kaleidoscope at all, probably Claudia or Sharon or some other would-be yuppie sounding nightmare name. Now she is just grey, slack muscle skinny, alabaster skeletal dust, wearing nothing but fool's jewellery which is draped upon her like some gaudy Egyptian Goddess. There she will rot and the dust will cover her and smooth out her corpse.

I shook her again, head wobbled and swayed with no force trying to hold it in place and then with one final shake her mouth opened and a ball of clotted sick plopped out onto the floor.

A fat fly flew by my head, it came from within the ball of sick, and I was sure it said hello to me as it went on by on its merry way. I followed the fly as it weaved around, he seemed to want me to follow him as when I lost him for the briefest of moments I found him again waiting for me, and he was hovering above a five pound note that someone had dropped on the floor at the entrance to the alleyway where, for those few weeks, I had called home.

Cheers fly-boy.

No problems, pal, have a good one, and the fly flew off and left me too it.

I picked up the money with hands that did well not to shake. It seemed a long way down there and it took double the amount of time to come back up and the world span a little. On the five pound note, written in messy handwriting, was a phone number and a name.

It took me two days to gather together enough change to call the number that was on that five pound note. Two days of begging. Two days of being fobbed off. Two days of being given that stupid fucking smile you give beggars when you fumble in your pockets and shrug your shoulders proclaiming to the world and all that would listen that – Hey look at me, I'm trying to get some money out of my pocket for this poor street bum, but I don't have any but if I did I would most certainly drop a copper or two into his dirty nicotine stained hand. Here's the thing, don't smile at us, don't put your hands in your pockets and pretend you haven't got any change to give us, tell us the truth. I aint mad at ya, hell, I didn't hand out pocket change to any Tom, Dick or Harry when I was like you, but at least I had the decency to ignore them.

I sat on the same street corner for two days. Most of the city seemed to walk by me, they paid me little to no attention at all. I ate lukewarm sausage rolls, and brutally cold tea, my hand outstretched, but not for a high five.

When finally it seemed as though I had enough pennies I went looking for a pay phone. It took me a while to find a working phone box. Times have moved on I guess, but not enough so that those moody business cards of ladies wishing to service you for a few quid haven't gone. Will they ever go, will there ever be a time when a woman's slit aint something that money can buy?

The phone box I found stunk of stale piss, stale bleach, and stale sweat. The fluorescent light above me flickered and hummed, seemed to flicker more when I stood underneath it, as if it knew that I was there, sentient computer chip brain placed in a light bulb just because we can. The receiver was smeared almost to a bone white, the cord frayed like a junkie's vein. I tapped out the numbers, really slowly, I literally couldn't afford to get the phone number wrong. It wasn't an easy number to type, the fates conspiring against me, not wanting me to ring it. It was all nines and threes and fives and a zero and my fingers wanted to press the other numbers so bad, so, so bad. Why is that, why is it when you need to be precise your inner mind wants you to have an epileptic fit and shit all over the place. I had the beer jitters. I didn't like the number I was dialling, all of a sudden it felt like a trap, a ploy by my ex-wife to get back at me. Maybe they have found out the truth of what I did. Surely not.

Finally I finished dialling. There were some clicks and whirring noises buzzing in my ear and then the line connected and rang. It kept on ringing. Digital waiting period. I looked through the murky glass Perspex windows that had amazing scratch lines gouged across them like the canyons on Mars. Street maps for bacteria. There was nothing on the outside world to keep my attention as the phone rang and rang and rang.

Ring-Ring... A bus drove by. No police cars followed.

Ring-Ring...Then a truck and a car hacked by, then another bus and another truck. Planes flew overhead, vapour trails behind metal angels. Busy road. People everywhere, ghosts of people through my Perspex glass view screen all going places, looking at the phone box holding their mobile phones then looking at me thinking why the hell would someone use a phone box in this day and age? Well, we are not all like you, I mumbled to myself.

Ring-Ring... None of them were police men. Maybe this isn't a trap after all.

Ring-Ring... The line kept ringing. It was becoming annoying.

Ring-Ring... A bus stopped on the other side of the road. On its side it had a poster of a man that looked like me but a lot happier.

Ring-Ring... It was glued to the side, frayed, and pulled away at the edges. The man is smiling at something we can't see, it's behind us all, whatever it is that is making him smile we can never see. Jokes on us I guess.

Ring-Ring... Upon the poster was written: Time to change your future... Time to forget your past... Time to Join Us...

Ring... The ringing stopped. There was a woman's voice, Hello?

Forget your past, I told her.

What.

What?

Who is this?

I found your number on a fiver.

Oh. Okay. Wow that actually worked.

Car drones by.

Where are you? she asks. It sounds as if she's in a cubicle. She sounds slim, blonde, long legs, I bet she wears glasses, black rimmed. A secretary maybe. No, probably a PA for some rich, big cocked CEO of a tech company whose products make no actual sense and are made of materials like pre-fabulated amulite. I bet that CEO moves about in a sleek grey suite with crocodile skin shoes and a wallet to match. Fucking hate that guy.

I don't really know where I am. Your name is Steph, right.

Yeah. Where did you find the fiver?

A fly gave it to me.

Ha. That's weird. Why did you call me?

Because you told me to.

I guess. This is weird, I'm surprised it worked. Do you want to meet up?

Seems odd.

What, meeting up? That's the point, isn't it?

I don't know. The bus is telling me that it's time to change my future and to forget my past and to join them in whatever it is that they are doing. Why would it do that, how does it know?

Maybe I can be your future?

That sounds corny.

A man knocks on the phone box window. He is nothing but a smeared Vaseline ghoul thanks to the windows condition. He taps his bare wrist, I know what he's trying to make clear to me.

You still there? now her voice isn't that secretarial, more like a checkout girls who doesn't really want to be there and would rather be at home doing her nails or her boyfriend.

Yeah, I'm here. But I gotta go, there's a guy tapping his wrist at me.

Don't you want to meet up? That's why you called, right?

The man taps on the window again. There is something about a man that knocks on a phone box window that sends warning signals to my brain. You don't mess with a man that knocks on a phone box and taps a fake, non-existent watch on his hairy wrist.

I gotta go. Bye Steph.

I put the phone down and think it would have been fun to meet up with her and to see what it was that she wanted.

Again the guy knocks on the window. I open the door and the sounds and smells of the street engulf me like a Victorian miasma. Modern age plague we all inhale, but we don't do anything about it, just let it slowly kill us. His aftershave is strong enough to floor a rhino.

About time, he tells me.

He has two front teeth missing. I make no eye contact with him. I don't make a sound, just keep my head down, hold the door open for him like a good boy should.

Jesus it stinks in here. Mate, you shit yourself or something?

I let the door close, hear him check for change in the little slot but he will be disappointed. I walk off, looking at the floor, holding the fiver in my pocket, caressing it, thinking about Steph which makes me think about the loose change I still have in my back pocket which then makes me think about meeting up with her which then leads me to thinking about what the knocking man said which then forces me to think that I hope I don't smell that bad, I don't want to smell of shit I want to smell like he did, I want the stink that could floor a rhino.

I've not had a proper drink in what seems like a fortnight, my body still numb thanks to all that has been consumed in the recent past. I'm like a capacitor, ripe with fermented liquid, ripe with decay, but still alive and living, charged with alcohol, holding it back like a dam, slow releasing my energy up into my brain in regimented units so that I don't end up as dry as a bone. I wonder what Steph thought about me, who she thought I was, and what she thought I did. Why is the point? What's the point she made reference too? The sounds of a pneumatic drill pounds the air, its impacts match my heart rate. I sweat grease as I walk, its summer, yet here I am wearing thick jumpers and jeans and leather shoes whilst everyone else is in shorts, or skirts, or cotton suits. I can feel a sober Judge on my shoulder, he's pounding his gavel at my existence, at my reality, he's blowing away the fug of drunkenness, I am seeing through clear eyes. Dry mouth, drier veins, a liver that aches, a bladder hot with stale piss, a bowel blocked with too much fibre and potassium, its hanging so low in my body I fear it may come falling out of my backside if I'm not too careful. Hot, sober fever, runny nose, itchy eyes, lumpy throat, abscess filled gums. Marks of a man truly fucked.

Then I see Doug.

Blessed be the Doug.

Doug has a limp. It's not an injury, the guy has just robbed a corner shop of two bottles of cider. The limp is caused by the bottles shoved down his slack trousers. He waves, asks me what I am up to, I shrug and tell him nothing, though I am still thinking of the woman on the end of the phone that wanted to meet up with me, still thinking of the Judge on my shoulder, still pondering the point of putting a number on a fiver, Nothing, I'm up to nothing.

Do I smell? I ask him.

He laughs at me, keeps limping along the road as the cars and people buzz by. The pneumatic drill is closer, there is a whiff of cement dust in the air. The tarmac is melting beneath my feet, it tries to glue me in place. The day has moved along, the sun is high, bright beams of light like lasers pierce my eyes. The smog of the city is a comfort blanket, vans and cars and trucks are my reminders of life. A few people bump me, maybe I bump them. I always seem to be walking against the traffic of your everyday life.

I haven't had a real drink for a while. I follow Doug, I know he needs a friend to drink with. He always needs a friend to drink with thanks to the things he saw during the battle on Goose Green in 1982 and hasn't yet gotten over. Just another forgotten war hero of the war that will be forgotten. He has a shake in his right hand, drink softens it, but it's pretty obvious. Rifle shake, he calls it. Too many rounds fired running up that hill, too many grenades going off and screams of men both us and theirs filling the chilly night air, too much blood splashing over muddy camos. Watching ships sink off the coast, watching men fearing a death that will hurt and crying deep into sleeves or on each other's shoulders, not shell shocked, death shocked.

He told me once that he had a place in the Lake District. A log cabin in the middle of nowhere. He would go there when the world around him became too much, he would go there to be quiet, to build up the tolerance to that which wishes to bring him down. He hands me a map, tells me to look and to remember and to never forget. It is a place I will remember. But that's a memory for another day.

We sit and drink. We talk. Well, he talks and I listen and nod along. The sun dips behind the buildings, traffic builds up, then clogs like fat in an artery. The city has a heart attack and grinds to a halt. He's still talking, releasing his dam of words on top of me and I am like the city and my ears clog with words and with images that I don't want up there.

Then it hits me and I preach my new found sermon to Doug, She wants to have sex.

Who does?

In-between chugs of cider from a spittle filled bottle, Steph.

Who's Steph?

A woman on the end of the phone. Do I smell of shit?

Don't know. They all smelt of shit, all of em, swam in it, lived in it all the days we battered em, the filthy shit living stinking sonsofbitches. But we had em on the run....

Need to get clean.

Clean, there aint no clean, not anymore, and his eyes burn through my eyes and for once I feel uncomfortable about the truth that he is telling me.

The cider is going. Doug is gone, he is mumbling to himself about Captain somebody or another, about fixing bayonets, and going at them. He is lost now to a past I guess he wants to forget about but simply can't because he keeps thinking about it. So I leave him in the doorway and head back to the phone box. I never see Doug again.

The sober Judge had hopped off my back. I walked along the narrow streets always looking ahead, ignoring your rush hour life, I was flowing with the traffic for the first time. I walked with pace, a little leap following every step and I watched myself in a window as I went along like some purple velour suited pimp. The thought of speaking to Steph kept me going. The cider was trying to tire me out but I wouldn't let it. A monkey that is the solid form of my thoughts of how much I must stink scratched my eyes, reminded me of what the phone box window knocking man had said. I rubbed my eyes, maybe that will get rid of him. I thought that I should I ask a stranger if I smelt? Seemed reasonable.

I stopped a woman. Black hair tied back hard enough to scalp herself, Do I smell of shit? She bundled through me, looked through me, looked through me, her eyes told me all I needed to know.

I stopped a man, he was fat, wore jeans and a polo shirt designed to be raised as a flag not worn as clothes, Please sir, do I smell of shit?

You what? Piss off.

His eyes didn't tell me much but his words sure did.

Another woman, this one wore all black and looked so bloody miserable I thought my worries must pale in comparison to what she must be going through. I stopped her, or tried to anyway, Excuse me, madam, do I smell to you?

Nothing. Not one single word, not one single fleeting anything to tell me what I needed to know.

I gave up, three questions into my survey and I'd had enough, we aren't all Tin Men you know. I decided that I shall have to take a chance.

I reached the phone box again. Window knocking man wasn't there. I checked the area surrounding the phone box and he wasn't there either. I asked a few people if they wanted to use the machine but again my survey fell on deaf ears and was pelted with abuse.

Familiar bleach piss smell. Familiar hum and blink of the semi-sentient light fitting above my head. Bone white receiver, frayed cables and tarnished metal casing. I checked the change dispenser, there was a single pound coin in there. I put that and all the change that I had into the machine and dialled the number and this time my hands did not shake, my thoughts weren't chaotic, because after all, I was free of the sober Judge and his beshitted gavel tapping me on my bruised shoulder.

Familiar ring. The pneumatic drill wasn't going off in the distance but my heart made up for it.

The world outside had gone quiet. I had a dry mouth. I was so desperate for a drink I thought that I may have to lick the window for just a drop of purifying water.

The ringing stopped. Panic flooded every part of me. The world I had constructed suddenly felt wrong, fragile, and apt to break. There was a silence that would put deep space to shame. I heard my heart beat, I heard the light fitting, I heard the sounds of my eyeballs scraping in their sockets as they twitched all over the place.

Hello, a familiar voice. She sounded like a secretary again. I felt saved.

It's me again.

I thought I had lost you. Time to change your future is it?

Yeah, I think it is.

Where do you want to meet?

In the park. By the fountain. Tonight.

What's your name?

I'll tell you there. Eight?

Okay. See you then.

Bye Steph.

Bye stranger.

The line clicked off. Change dispensed and I put the receiver back and was feeling so good about myself that I left the change in the little silvery dispenser for perhaps another less fortunate soul to find and change their life forever.

I looked at myself in street windows. I looked at myself in car wing mirrors. I looked at myself reflected in puddles. I hated myself. How could I not? The cider I stole was still warm in my belly. The two packets of crisps and the chicken Caesar wrap I lifted churned in my gut, there wasn't much space in my gut for much more. I remember thinking that if I didn't shit pretty soon, then I would likely either shit myself, or explode, or rupture something that really should stay sealed up.

Staring back at myself from the glass covering an advertising board at a bus stop. My face replacing a pill that can cure headaches in less the ten minutes. Is that ironic? The bus stop electronic sign told me it was 19:45. The park was just across the road, the evening sun shone through the trees, silhouettes of you going about your business. All of you thinking you carry the flame but in reality all you are doing is carrying a Molotov cocktail and when the time comes to throw it in anger you realise you have no strength to throw it and so instead you just end up throwing the glass bottle at your feet and WHOOMPF up you go in flames.

I made my way to the fountain, against the flow of the people doing whatever people do in parks, but I made it without incident. A fresh breeze whipped up around me, a warm embrace given by nature, I was unable to smell myself so I had to assume that I did not smell. The wooden bench was cool to the touch, I ran my hands along the wooden planks, up the cast iron arm rests. I could feel every blemish, it was like skin, and it told me a story much like our bodies have the ability to.

A woman's voice, I didn't look up to see who it was, You came. I didn't think you would.

I still didn't look up, How do you know it's me?

She considered that for a moment, I don't, but why else would you be here?

I finally looked up, I couldn't stop myself. It's her voice after all. She had dark hair that hung down below her shoulders, her eyes were as big as the moon, and God they were so blue. My ability to tell if she was short or tall had gone, but her body is there though, I could see it, but the ability to define it was gone. She smelt of fruit and she used the same hairspray as my ex-wife.

You look how I thought you would look.

That's good, right?

Yeah.

Can I sit down?

Of course, I shuffled over a bit, I was still unsure of myself, images flashed before my eyes of my reflection.

I, err, look, I don't know how to say this, so here goes; you live on the streets?

That obvious?

She flicked a lock of hair away from that round face that looked as if it had drowned a thousand would be lovers, Well, you are wearing a jumper in the middle of summer.

Oh, yeah. When it gets cold these things are killed for. Heat exhaustion in the summer, exposure in the winter. I sniggered at my own singular wit, but it wasn't really a joke and she knew that as well as I did. There was something about this woman that spoke to me of her own horrid and hard past.

Did you want something to eat?

I have no money.

Now it was her turn to chuckle to herself and she flicked that lock of hair again and she shook her head. Look, let's drop the act, I know what you are, you know what I want. This isn't some sort of courting ritual from the dark ages, or some first date bullshit. We will go back to mine, eat, discuss the terms, and then fuck.

Terms?

Yes. Now come on, I'm hungry.

We both stood, she more graceful than me, as if she was used to getting up from chairs all day long.

Steph, do I smell?

A flick of that damned loose lock of hair. She looked me up and down. I finally was able to make her out, she was wearing tight jeans and a small leather jacket over a low cut top, like something my ex-wife would have worn back when we were dating. She stopped looking me up and down, smiled a sweet charm smile, and took hold of my shoulder. We were the same height and she looked me straight in the eye and before she spoke I knew what she was going to say...

Yes, you stink. But that's half the charm. That's the reason why we are here.

I knew you were going to say that.

Then why did you ask?

We walked back to her flat.

I watched her walk. Watched her legs, watched her tight backside, and would occasionally get a glimpse of the bulge where her pussy was. Her breasts pushed out from her top, the leather jacket keeping them in place but they still bobbed along nicely. Her shoes clipped and clopped along the pavement. There wasn't one thing I would have changed about her, though perhaps I am drawn to that type of plain woman whom to me blossom a sexuality that to others is hidden. I hadn't thought that way about a woman for a long time. There was no need to. Out on the streets to think like that usually ends up with you dragging some poor girl off the street and raping her. I know, I've seen it happen and done nothing to stop it. It's a cruel circle of life kind of thing.

I couldn't stop staring at her, I saw myself doing it in car windows. She knew what I was up to and she liked it.

You used to be married?

I looked at my left hand, at the pale white line on my finger where the ring used to be and at the finger she must have seen as I was checking her out, Yeah, I was.

We crossed the road hidden in each other's shadows, What happened?

What didn't happen.

That bad huh?

I should have listened to my dad. I always did, except for then.

How did you meet?

What my dad, isn't that obvious?

No smart arse, you and the ex?

What does it matter?

Listen, if this is going to work, if you want inside of this, if you want to play, then you have to play by the rules. So, how did you meet?

Steph scared me, but in a way that wants me to be with her, I wanted her to scare me, to harass me, to threaten me so that I knew she cared. She seemed clever, knew what she wanted, and would get it no matter what.

But her questions released something inside of me and I am off on one, the floodgates opened as I went on about the past. I tell Steph that I married in the spring, that we had been dating for a year. Her dad had died, left us some money and so we used that to get married. We were in love, blah blah blah. Young, carefree and fucking stupid. We met at university, had wild sex and took wilder drugs and walked about as if we owned the place. I was drawn to her plain looks, her long legs, her big tits. She seemed un-complicated. We both believed we were meant to be. Like peas in a pod or some other Hollywood cliché that doesn't exist in the real world, but we believed in it anyway. Around university we quoted Burroughs and Selby, sometimes Hemmingway or if we were feeling particularly on form some Joyce. On rare occasions we would quote Tolkien poems to each other in Elvish. We wrote poetry to each other which then seemed so alive and true and great but now, in retrospect, it's just a big pile of shit and I can't help but feel that we must have looked like a couple of complete tosser's back then, both consumed in our own self-important smog. But hey, we were in love, blah blah blah. Ancient-Viking-medieval-Britain poetry quoting love.

She was the first girl that ever showed an interest in me and that made me glue myself to her like I thought it was never possible to be able to. She wasn't the first girl I took to bed. I didn't know how to speak to women, and so I spoke at them. I had little to no experience, and being drunk, surrounding yourself with even drunker women is no way to learn. I believed that to impress a woman you had to be manly, have an ability to exaggerate nonsense. Whatever the fuck that meant.

The first girl I ever bedded was called Doreen. Doreen? I know right, what a stupid name for a girl that lived in the nineties. I only mention her because on mine and Julies first date (Julie is my ex-wife FYI) we saw Doreen out with a bunch of her girl mates and I, for some inexplicable reason, took it upon myself to tell Julie that sat over there, on the table with the five girls sat around it drinking their cheap cocktails and wearing cheaper dresses, was the first girl I ever fucked.

Oh, she said, looking at me like she didn't know what else to say and I suppose she didn't because she went quiet.

Yeah, I continued, she was a complete nightmare, all screams and hair waving and arms flapping. A fucking nightmare.

Julie laughed an uncomfortable laugh, I thought that's what men wanted?

What fake, all words and no action. No way. It would have been better if she'd have just laid there like a fucking cardboard box with a pulse. She talked like she'd be a good time but that's all she is; talk. She wouldn't even let me take her bra off.

Oh, Julie said again taking a sip of her gin and tonic, and she stared at the floor admiring the grouting and the glimmer of the glitter baked into the tile.

I had to get rid of her. I hate all that lot. Look at them with their cheap cocktails and low cut tops and all that make up trowelled onto their faces to cover up the wrinkles and pimples and scabs and scars. It's all fake. Nothing is real to them. They are just council flat mums in the making, glamorising their lives off the back of magazines and TV shows where everything is picture perfect and the streets are made of gold. What they don't know is that this world they want so badly is a world full of blow jobs and back door fucks just for a half-chance at being lucky in something that doesn't mean anything when it comes down to it. All that effort for a two minute wank video.

I suppose, but what about me?

It's was then that I realised she was wearing quite a bit of makeup. I am sure that when we had met outside the bar she hadn't been wearing any, but clearly now she was. I was a bit upset by her looks then, when I saw her around the University buildings she was plain, always understated, but here she was all dolled up and trying way too hard to be something that she wasn't. Low cut top with tits half hanging out, tight jeans and tall boots. Not at any point did I think that it was for me. I went for the plainer girls as I was so sure that they wouldn't throw me out of bed when they realised I was a shit lay and had the communication skills of a retarded door handle.

Don't you think they do it to impress? You lot can be right bastards when it comes to looks, we live in a world controlled by looks, controlled by you.

Not all blokes, but maybe, yeah, I see your point.

Sometimes a girl just wants to dress up. Show it off. Flaunt it. Doesn't mean she is fake or a slut or whatever. You guys do the same, it may not be as obvious, but it's all the same. Guys prance about flexing this and flashing that and talking about their dicks and showing off. It's just the same as a girl with big breasts wearing a low cut top. We can be who we want to be when we want to be it as long as it doesn't hurt anyone.

I thought you were different that's all, I say to her and she smiled at me because I suppose I had shown her a little bit of me that I didn't know existed or was even respected by girls.

I am different. Tonight I thought I would try, and she sipped on her gin and tonic through her little purple straw in a way that would now send pulses running through my cock but back then, back when I was a teenage dirtbag baby, and as most men can attest too, I didn't have a fucking clue what was going on, a girl could be laying there with her fanny out with a sign next to her saying Fuck Me Now Baby and I still would question if the sign was meant for me or if I was the right one.

Back then I just didn't get it.

We said nothing more to each other until both of us had finished our drinks and it was time to decide where the night was going. Now, if I were a betting man, at that point I would have put my money on this relationship going absolutely nowhere. But she moved it along, she was the engine and I the lucky passenger. That's how the relationship was, her going along and making the decisions and choosing what and where and when and how and me just going along with it. Six years later I wished she hadn't. Six years later I wished I had ran away from that bar and made it my own personal mission never to see her again. We stopped at a set of lights. Steph had her keys out and she was looking at me, Why, what did she do?

Enough, she did enough.

I could feel the sober Judge tapping me on the shoulder, the red of the traffic light was too bright, the noise of it, BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! it was far too loud and each gormless BEEP was like a needle being shoved into my brain and swished around. Can we stop and get a drink?

No. There will be no more of that tonight.

But I need a drink. Please. You don't understand.

We crossed the street, me a little ways back, pleading that I needed a drink. My teeth were dry, my eyes were squelching in their sockets, and I could feel that little judgmental prick tapping me on the shoulder again and again and he was leaving a mark on my shoulder.

You don't understand, I need it, I need a drink.

She turned around, her look stopped me dead in my tracks. Her face was flashing amber warning lights. Don't understand, don't understand? What the fuck do you know about what I do or don't understand? She rolls up her sleeve and points to the faded red pot marks dotted up and down her arm, Eight years I needed shit, eight long fucking years of stabbing this up and sucking cock for a hit, so don't you tell me what need is. You have no idea what real need is so shut the fuck up and stop acting like a baby! The problem with all you drunks and homeless is you think you know what need is when all you really know is shit.

She turned and headed off into the night, heels clipping and clopping, arse swaying and I guessed she was right. I could quit the drink, but surely that would have killed me? I'd heard of people dying from lack of alcohol and after only being dry for what felt like days, but was in fact about fifteen seconds, I at that moment felt close to death.

I followed her like a pup. She walked with a sway that hypnotised me, a confidence of herself that scared me and enticed me at the same time. I pictured her as a mermaid, a trap for sailors when their desires got the better of them. She was a land mermaid, a temptress, finding me and netting me when I was at my most vulnerable.

So it turns out this women has a list. A list of types of people to screw. Genres to bang. It just so happens that a tramp is one of those types on her list and it just so happens that I was the tramp that picked up the fiver she wrote her name and number on, so I'm the lucky fella that gets to get his end wet. The list was long, exhaustive, I didn't know there were so many different types of us. She had the usual:

White and Tall

Black (strong) *

Girl, short, with ginger hair

School Teacher *

Policeman (or woman but she has to be built strong)

But then the list turned darker, no, not dark...odd, yeah, the list turned odd:

Amputee (preferably arm)

Bald guy with tattoos

Prison Guard

User (not too far on the nod but close enough)

Rubbish Man (must be in overalls and must be in the arse) *

School Girl

Tramp (not a user, just a street walker)

The list went on and on. At a rough count there must have been at least two hundred different types of people she wanted to fuck. Only a handful were marked with a black star, I'm hoping they were the ones that she had managed to complete, but now thinking about it, does it really matter? Did it really matter? I guess not.

Anyway, I digress. One hour later I'm in her glistening bathroom scrubbing my dick with a flannel. Pre-sex rule. She said if we are going to screw then I have to be clean down there but still as dirty and smelly everywhere else or it's just not right.

I rinsed the flannel out, was about to put it back on the special little shelf it had by the bath but decided it's probably best to throw it in the bin. My head was starting to hurt, a delayed hangover was creeping up on me, and if I wasn't too careful I believed that I could easily find myself drinking the bottle of Listerine dry that was in the small white cupboard, or the bottle of Dettol bath cleaner, which looked particularly tempting to me and the Judge too who was, by the way, becoming ponderous. I filled a small cup with water and dropped the two Cocodamol 800mg's into my mouth and swallowed them with a hard and fast flick of the neck. The water I used as a clear out of my fizzing bowels. Taking pills dry had become easy and still is.

I looked down at myself, my naked form. I had a bit of a pot belly, some dark fluff trying to portray hair was sticking out of random places but the rest of me was non-descript, insert look of one generic man please oh good creator. She asked that I brushed my teeth, cleaned up my face a little just to get the city grime off. She had two of everything in that bathroom. Two toothbrushes, two cups to rinse, two toothpastes, two soaps, more than two towels but still, more than there should have been in a house just for one, two large boxes of Tampax, two types of shower gel, two pairs of scissors, two pairs of tweezers, and to my comical dismay a spare flannel hanging right in front of me on the squeaky clean tiles.

After cleaning up my cock, scrubbing myself up a bit and brushing my teeth which made me gag a little, I walked into the front room and there she is; naked, lying on the floor, two fingers shoved up inside her whilst her other hand rubs and flicks at her clit. No lie, I'm hard in an instant...I can see all that as clear as the stars when I close my eyes. I remember starting to walk over to her, ready, willing, and semi-able, I wanted to do what she had brought me there to do...

Not yet, she said in-between breaths.

I stood and watched her as she brought herself off, her pink skin wet with sweat, I could hear her fingers slopping around, and I discovered that I had missed that sound. I had missed that. The build-up, the wait, the undress, the watching, the wanting, the touching, the closeness, the dreams of what might happen, and it's the thoughts of not doing it that get me off more than the actual act of screwing. The two of us there, in that room, we hadn't known each other for more than two hours but yet there we were, in a moment that only trusting couples should be in.

Wank over me, she demanded.

I walked over to her and did as I was told.

Both of us bringing ourselves off. She watching me, me watching her. I could feel myself starting to end. Twenty seconds tops, and she must of seen this and she went at herself harder and moaned and moaned and I stroked harder and then I was gone. I couldn't hold it back like I used to, it is, and still is, all numb down there, devoid of decent twitch muscle, and my hot spunk went spraying over her tits, over her face, and then dribbled down my hand and over the laminate flooring. She was looking at me, slowly easing her fingering, the hand that was inside of her was now smearing my greyish goo all over her. She seems happy with herself, I was barely standing up what with climaxing, sobering up a little and with two 800mg horse tranqs dissolving in my blood stream I was surprised that I hadn't collapsed.

How long has it been? She asked me

I can't remember.

That's long enough, and she winked and licked up what I ejaculated.

I've got some on your floor, I should get and cloth or some....

Rape me.

What.

Rape me, now, before I call the police and tell them you were going to do it anyway.

But you know I'm going to do it.

Never you mind that you fucking pussy, now fucking rape me and do it right, don't half do it or bail out and say you cant.

So I did.

I forced her legs apart, held her down and threatened her and grabbed her throat and spat upon her and all sorts and she acted it out so much, so well in fact, that at first I wanted to pull out, I didn't want to do it, but then something took me over, something inside my head, an urge all men must have to keep going once we have started. Like a dog has to keep eating that mop head even though it knows it will kill itself, a man has to go on thrusting when already inside of a woman. I lasted longer, its second time around, and when ready to cum again I went to pull out but she stopped me and I climaxed inside of her and she gripped my arse cheeks hard enough to pierce the skin and I felt my hot blood seep down my leg as my spunk filled her up. She arched her back, she seemed lost in what we were doing, as if it had been as long a wait for her too, and finally her wait has come to an end, and she finally got fucked by a tramp.

The pain on my arse cheeks was enough for my legs to buckle and I collapsed to the side of her, my cock slipping out and dribbling the last few drops onto the towel she had laid underneath her.

She slapped my bare arse, both of us were panting hard.

Good boy.

But I didn't answer. Lack of drink, too much medication, a double climax, had bested me. I felt numb from the scalp down.

I must have blacked out.

When I came around I was on my front, she was sat on the sofa opposite me, and she's dressed, looking at me with a blank stare. She held a small tumbler of amber liquid, I could smell what was in it, that's how I knew that it wasn't a dream.

When she spoke her voice was softer than I remembered, I used to dream of pretty things, unicorns and fairies and gardens full of blossoming flowers that kept their colour all through the year. I was a young girl once, I had my mother's face and my father's eyes. Then I became a woman thanks to a sailor man that thought it fun to fuck a girl barely out of middle school. My dreams turned to sadness, full of nothing but hurt and his face looking at me with those lusting eyes that never seemed to blink or look away. Before I became me, late at night when I couldn't sleep, I could still feel him inside of me. But those days are long over. Now I dream of nothing. Blackness, a static sleep. Yeah, I sucked dick for a living, I did whatever it was to get money and to get a hit. Then one day I found a bag full of money, and though I had to kill a man and his lover to keep it mine, to this day that bag full of cash was the best thing ever to happen to me. Out there is everyone's bag full of the thing they need to have a great life. Some people find their bag, others never do and live a sad shitty life without a cell mate to share it with. Some have had that bag from an early age and don't realise it until it's too late and it's those people I feel sorry for. She must have seen my dumb face, my dribbling chin, and my vacant vacuum eyes staring back at her.

What I am saying is, is that perhaps out there, is your bag and one day you will find it and everything will be alright.

Maybe you are my bag.

She laughed and that hurt, Get dressed and get out. That's enough for today.

Will I see you again?

Only if you still have my number and only if I say so.

There were clothes piled on the table by the door. They weren't mine, but they were a man's set.

Take them, they are yours now.

In the pocket of the jeans was a rolled up bundle of twenties. There must have been five hundred quid rolled up, it was literally the most money I had seen in years.

Find a hotel. Clean yourself up. She still wasn't looking at me, she was transfixed with the floor where earlier we had played out the ancient act and where I sprayed my semen. I hoped she wasn't mad that I got some on her flooring and possibly ruined what looked like expensive stuff.

I said, What's the point? I'm just going to go back onto the streets.

Just do what I say or there will be no next time.

I left the flat, closed the door behind and I heard her lock it. I walked back through the park and I slept on the same bench that a few hours before I had met Steph at. In the morning I didn't know who I was, I was wearing someone else's clothes.

I should have brought my sleeping bag with me on the hunt. I forgot how cold it gets in the forest at night when the sun hasn't had enough time, or enough strength for that matter, to heat up the ground. A sleeping bag. I woke up one morning, I'd been sleeping rough in a doorway to a dressmakers. There was a note stuck to my sleeping bag. It was October, summer had gone, and winter was scratching at the door like a trick or treater. There was a chill to the air, I could see my breath fogging up in front of me. I could see the note but I didn't do anything about it. It was too early, the sun wasn't yet up. I could hear the dustbin men in the streets behind the store so I knew it was after six. They are like clockwork those guys.

I drank the last of the warm beer I had saved from the previous night. It had no taste, nothing really did back then. I remember having an ongoing bad taste in my mouth. Ever since I brushed my teeth at Steph's flat I had that bad taste lingering in my mouth.

I uncurled the note. Three twenty pound notes fell out. They fluttered to the floor. I scrunched them up quickly and put it with the other ten notes I had left from my last visit with Steph.

Written in a purple pen with familiar messy handwriting it read:

Good Morning,

You haven't called me yet.

Meet at the same park, tonight, 8pm.

Before lunchtime, use the money to get a hotel room and wash the bits you washed before.

Steph

xx-xx

I read the note again, it said the same thing. The little kisses at the bottom sickened me. The paper didn't smell of perfume or of her, it just smelt of paper and ink. I put it back where I kept the money and rubbed my hands through my short greasy hair and then down my face which felt wet with thicker grease and it mixed with the dew of the morning until I had developed my own line of face creams for the poor. It's wasn't raining, but there was a light frost on the cars and tops of the houses that I could make out through the light mist. Maybe if I'd of stayed asleep I would have been discovered years into the future and thought of as an iceman like that old brown sack of a man they found in that peat bog.

There was a knock on the door that I was laying against. Not a gentle knock either, whomever it was that was doing the knocking cared not a jot that it was glass that he was attacking. I turned my head and would you believe it, stood there as bold as brass is Mr-Knock-On-the-Phone-Box-Window-Tapping-His-Bare-Wrist-Man, he is pointing at me and mouthing Fuck Off, Go on, fuck off with ya and pointing out into the dark street where the mist lay in a flat grey blanket. He was dressed up like a security guard, though what good he was I wasn't sure. He kept acting out his routine, tapping and pointing and mouthing Fuck Off over and over and his face turned redder and redder with each iteration so eventually I nodded and said, Okay-okay, I'm going-I'm going. It took me about five minutes to pack my stuff up and he watched me all the while I was doing this, eagle eyed, and every time I glanced at him he tapped his wrist making sure that I knew the time was moving along.

He didn't even wear a watch. From the looks of him I bet he didn't have a watch.

I left the doorway with my weighty back pack and didn't turn around, just headed off into the early morning, walking the streets that I had walked for what must have been at least five years by that point. As I walked I thought to myself about how many steps I had taken in those five years, how many miles that would equate too. I remember trying to think where I could have travelled to. Here is what I came up with: I must have done at least 4000 steps a day. That's about two miles a day. I had been on the streets for five years. So, ipso-facto, that's two multiplied by 365 and then multiply that by five. I used my breath to steam up a window so that I could do the long multiplication and ta dah, I had walked 3560 miles. Phew. Not as many as I thought, but still good enough. The problem was that without a map I couldn't see how far that amount of miles would have gotten me.

I bought some cheap beer from a corner shop, six cans of the finest gut-rot-brew money can buy. The man behind the counter took my money with a vacant stare but I'm used to that. I put the cans into my backpack, was about to sling it over my shoulder when the man behind the counter said, They moved away last week. Big lorry came, took everything by the looks of things.

You what, I said as I slung the backpack over my shoulder.

Oh, sorry, I thought you used to live down this road, with them.

What is this road?

Bakers.

Too many memories to remember came rushing up like vomit.

Number twenty-eight, I said.

He nodded and carried on sorting out the papers and doing this and that though he kept on peeking at me every now and then as I stood there trying to piece together all the shit that was pouring into my mind. Finally I said, My wife and daughter. Ex-wife. She's my ex-wife, we lived there. We bought Skittles and Coke from here.

Oh, I can't remember that far back. You doing alright?

What does it look like, and I walked out of the shop and stared down the road that was once my road and not one bit of it looked at all familiar to me. I leant against the dark blue bin, inhaling the fetid cigarette butts and sour piss that some dog has sprayed up it. Generic road, cars each side, terraced houses, chimney stacks and windows and street lights and chalk on the floor where the children played tic-tac-toe. There was nothing special about that road. Walking along the pavement I must have walked along a thousand times before, passing houses I must have seen a thousand times before and they meant absolutely nothing to me. Walked by pretentious lions as sentinels, rubbish filled bins, lanterns, butterflies hanging from walls. Satellite dishes pointing up to the sky. Cracked paint on walls, broken paving slabs, graffiti coated recycling bins. Outside number twenty-eight. No satellite dish, no lions outside, no butterflies on the walls. Blue door, brass handle, small letter box. The curtains were drawn, I stared up to the top windows, maybe that was the main bedroom, I couldn't remember. I took a can of beer from my bag and drank it just looking up and staring at the house that I once lived in but can't remember if I did with one hundred percent accuracy.

But I could see her.

Not the ex, my daughter. It's her hair I could see. Perhaps it was the orange street lights that was reminding me of her, those lights that were as orange as her hair. She was tall for her age, clever, could run all day long. She enjoyed the swings, but not the climbing frame. Playing Frisbee, chucking stones into puddles. There was a pain in my chest, and I drank some more beer, and then that pain went.

How I found myself there I don't know. All those miles walked and there I was. All 3560 miles walked in those last five years and there I was, back to where it had all began. I reached down inside of myself, trying to make sense of what was running through my head. It was no good. There was a film over everything, a plastic wrapping that I could not pierce. Acetate like concrete. I know what I saw up in that bedroom, I know what I did after that, but as for what went on in there for the time that I lived there, I have absolutely no idea. I felt nothing. Maybe my mind had removed those times from my mind, destroyed them like she destroyed me. Evacuated the conscious thoughts of the marriage that should never have happened. Whatever was in there is gone, or it's there but I just don't give enough of a shit for it to be pulled up. But I stood there, watching, waiting, adjusting my stance, drinking more beer, but it was all in vein, I didn't want to be there, I didn't want to think about there. Whatever thing that happened that drew me to there had failed in its mission to make me get back to the life that I once lived. I didn't want her back. To see my daughter would have reminded me of her, I can't bring up a memory that made me love my daughter, I couldn't go through that. I could see her orange fire hair, but that was it. I couldn't see her eyes, or her face or her little legs or her body or remember how she walked or talked or did anything. All I could see is the front door, all I could see was that fucking hotel room, and my ex-wife smeared in my brother's spunk. All I wanted to do was get the hell away from there and back to the comfort of my life and far away from whatever that was, all that bullshit, all that harbinger of hate.

The street lights went out. I could hear an alarm clock going off in one of the houses. I didn't want to be there anymore, I could feel the jigsaw puzzle of thoughts that I had up in my head starting to put itself together. I feared the sight of those memories. They would have made a picture, a picture of them and him. Fuck them, fuck him.

I walked away and drained the can of beer. The empty can I left on a wall like some totem of me being there. One day a man will find that can and it shall be worth a fortune. Maybe he will wonder who left it there, maybe...

It seemed to take a long time to get to the afternoon. The day seemed longer than most others. The low sun smudged its way along the sky, winter clouds grew, and they masked the world. I drank my drink, numbed myself further, and joined myself back into the world I left for a few fleeting moments with glue that's rotten and stinks. It was an easy fit, like putting on a well-worn pair of trainers, everything around me fitted, but it was loose, ready to slip away at any point. Did I self-harm that morning? Had I walked all those thousands of miles in those five years on some pilgrimage back to where it had all started? And who am I kidding with five years, it's been longer than that, it must have been longer than that. What would it be to be like someone else, what would it be like to be that man over there, walking his dog with his head held high? I drank some more, I enjoyed the empire of dirt I had created for myself. It was mine, not hers, or his, they couldn't take it away like they had taken everything else away from me. They took away my daughter, it was all their fault.

I found myself sitting on a wall outside of a car park. There weren't that many people around, though the road was busy with traffic. Grey sky, grey flowers, and grey hearts. There was a nice smell of petrol fumes coming from the car park. In my hand was an empty can of beer. Beside me were four more. I dreamt I was at my old house that morning, though my feet hurt enough to make me think that I was actually still there.

I followed the smell of petrol into the car park, my path lit with white fluorescents hanging from the ceiling, the tarmac-concrete road beneath me slick with oil and grime. The car park was jammed full of vehicles, I had no idea the difference between these machines, if they were old or new. All they were to me was coloured cubes of metal.

There was a corner that was unlit. I aimed for that, it took a good while, the floor was sticky, and my feet were drunk. I slumped down in the corner and wrapped my sleeping bag around me. I went on drinking then drifted off. Woke up and drank some more, found some blue pills I had kept from a few nights before and took those, drifting in an ocean of, an ocean of, an ocean of...

I remember nodding off.

I didn't wake up for a year.

I don't remember much of that year, hazy memories, everything covered in a film of reluctance to remember whatever events burned their way into my brain.

When I finally fully woke up I had a tattoo on my arm.

I don't know who Miriam is, or was, or will be. I don't even like the name Miriam, bit too Biblical for my likings.

Many months, many years, not sure what kind of time frame occurred back then. Time moved on despite me not seeing it and I went along with time like some great storm rolling across a vast toxic plain inhaling everything that is bad and dirty and I kept it stored up with no inkling as to when I would let it all out in a thunderous rampage.

During this time I knew a guy, his name was Kimi. We shared a place together above an old book store down a dead end road that wasn't on a city guide map or in the conscious of the public mind. It was a road that had no meaning, everyone who lived down it seemed pointless to the world at large. Front lawns were unkempt, windows perpetually closed with yellowing curtains always pulled across them. There always seemed to be a transit van parked down there, it only had three wheels. There were always bags of rubbish outside the houses, perpetually waiting for a collection that never seemed to come. The road was penis shaped, the turning area at the end was shaped like a pair of hairless testicles, and the japs eye as it were, was the way in and way out. More cars left than entered. Driving out of that road was like spurting forth from some giant tarmac/concrete cock.

Both Kimi and I were piss poor broke, both were jobless, both were scrounging drinkers and begging junkies, each having their own individual dreams that would never be fulfilled. Great dreamers of dreams we were, never quiet getting there but boy could we come up with a plan. I don't know how we paid rent on that flat. Dreaming doesn't make cash, doesn't fill up the old digital coffer box. Maybe that's why I got kicked out in the end by an angry landlord who always seemed out of breath and wheezy. As I was being vacated from the two bedroomed premises he threw a shit fit when he saw the state of the place, a mess that I never really paid much attention too. The grime was a comfort blanket to me, all the filth I lived in was a pleasant reminder to me that I was alive, able to smell it, able to taste it with every breath. Pot Noodle cartons, the plastic cases of microwave dinners and more empty bottles than you can shake a stick at were all my own personal Ikea line of rubbish furniture.

Anyway, Kimi was either Austrian or Bavarian or Swedish. He spoke with one of those Germanic/Scandinavian accents that all the girls love, but we can never replicate or know where they have come from so we just say Scandinavian and think ourselves Michael Palin and we gush over how beautiful their country is even though we have no clue what fucking country we are talking about. The women would swoon over his blonde hair and white-blue eyes. White/blue skin like those massive icebergs that float around occasionally destroying ships and ramming continents. His skin was smooth perfection, bleached white-pink by harsh winters and reflected sun from the glistening snow. He came over to England to find work, only instead he found women, drink, skag, and a realisation that work over here doesn't last too long and being a plasterer doesn't mean shit when there are streets filled with them. If you fail at school then you are either going to be a painter or a plasterer, or go to Art College. Plus the guy couldn't plaster to save his life, he could mix up a good bucket of the stuff and carry it to wherever the tradesmen wanted it, but as for actually slapping it up on the walls, he couldn't do that to save his life. Most of it ended up on the floor, or in his hair, or in his pockets.

Anyway, me and this Kimi guy were of the same thought during the spring of some year a few years back. We decided that going through the bins at the back of pubs and clubs would be the way to keep the Judges off of our backs. It was such a great idea that at first we questioned each other to make sure that such a thought could exist and that it hadn't yet been thought of. We went to the library and checked the encyclopaedias for the idea and couldn't find anything. We quickly decided that we were onto something good, struck gold, and we should just keep it between the two of us, don't write it down, or tell anyone else just in case they take it upon themselves to do the same and ruin it for us all. We used hushed voices when talking about it, spoke in code like spies, treated the idea like the Colonel treats the recipe for his secret sauce. This was a golden opportunity and not one to be given out to anyone else.

A few nights went by, we raided a few bins under the hot fuzz of the orange street lights. And the pickings were good, better than we would have hoped for and it was enough to see us through. Mind you, a word of warning based on actual findings. The drink will mostly be as warm as piss and twill taste much the same but in the end does it really matter? Nope. What matters is that we could get drunk on it and it was cheaper than actually buying the stuff so all was good and the idea was panning out and the world was our oyster, or pub bin, if you looked at it that way. Sometimes we would have to chase the rats away, kick out at them or use broom handles to force them from their doings, but, you know, when it comes to it; needs must and when you have a hook in your mouth sometimes you have to give in and be reeled in by that line and face the consequences of your actions. One night we saw two rats fucking on top of a full bottle of champagne, he was going at her like a pneumatic drill at a rock wall. We let him finish before taking it, guessing that times can be just as hard for rats as they can be for men.

We did have some issues, some early teething problems. For instance, some beer bottles that we picked out you had to drink through gritted teeth to strain out the fag butts or rolled up labels, so the next time you peel off the label from your beer bottle and poke it down the hole just remember that there might be some poor bastard having to drink through that. One night, a Tuesday night, Kimi got to the bottom of one bottle and yanked out a condom, it didn't looked used, but for two days I told him that that was one way of getting pregnant. He believed me enough to take a pregnancy test. It came up negative. No shit! I said, and he looked a little sad so I gave him a hug and had to drag him down from some scaffolding such was his despair at not being pregnant.

As I said previously, Kimi was a hit with the girls, and one of the reasons I hooked up with him was because of this. Most nights he had a girl in tow. How he paid for such night time liaisons was beyond me and I questioned him on it not because I was curious but because I was so God damned fucking jealous.

Kimi picked up these two girls, both long legs and torn tights with bright red lipstick and running mascara and fat tits and dumb mouths that claimed they were here to find work in the shows and be major stars and we laughed cos we are in the middle of fucking nowhere. There were no shows or stages to perform upon, just shops and alleys and fucking wasters looking to waste. We told them this, that what they were dreaming off was utter dog shit and they got a little pissed at the truth and Kimi steps in all Scandinavian hero or whatever and soon they are back in with us and drinking the wine we took from some strip joints bin and telling them that it is supposed to be warm, its foreign, and that's how the Europeans drink it. Couple of fucking morons.

So the drink is flowing and the night is looking good and the flat is getting smaller and the girls want to go out and me and Kimi converse about the situation and he says, This could sweeting the deal if we is taking out the girls, and I say, Yeah no probs, but let's get some free beer as drinks are pricey and we aint got no money. We escort the girls, their perfume stinging my nose hairs and making my eyes water, out into the dark cold world and the buildings watch us, corner store muggers glare and cars drone by and we breeze along inhaling the city, sucking up the life it bleeds making sure to dodge the dog shit, you always have to dodge the dog shit.

The two girls, Christ what was their names, they both pop some pills and Kimi winks and shimmies and grinds and flexes and we get some pills and we swallow them down and fuck me did my head start to spin and my legs turned to needles on a record player and Kimi is still grinding up against a lamp post and I am sure he has his dick out and that he is fucking that lamppost.

The girls aint nothing special, devils with dresses on, but I have a hardon for one of them as she has a scar running down her cheek and Kimi wants the other as she likes it up her ass and Kimi is an ass man. So its win win for both of us.

So, to seal the deal and flash what we got we go around the back of some corner pub that likes to think it's all that when really all it is a pub with shitty pants tucked down behind the U-bend and we make the girls wait, ask them to keep watch whilst we rummage through the bins and see what we can see. We tell them that we have to negotiate entrance to this fine establishment with the proprietor or some shit like that and they hang around and look impressed.

Holy ShhhhhhhiiiiiiIIIT!

Fucking me! Kimi bellowed in his dumb English, and he was right.

Six bottles of beer, opened, but all of them are only half full. They taste semi decent too, not fizzy, but us beggars can't be choosers.

What you doing? From the girl that likes it up her ass. Trudy, her name was Trudy.

Speaking with the barman, I said, and I kept rummaging as more beer could mean no pub which is good because I only had pretend money. I'm pretty sure Kimi had less than that.

Hurry up, for fuck sake, if I knew it would take this long I'd have kept on going, Scar girl said whilst puckering up to a fag and inhaling deeply and holding it like some drag act. I'm sure her name was Melisa. No, no, it was Marilyn. Trudy and Marilyn. There is nothing more in the bins and Kimi looks at me and shrugs his shoulders and we both look at the six beers that are really only four beers and that will have to do.

You ever fucking a girl down alleyway? He asks me.

Don't think so. Once in a courtyard, that count?

We should be taking them girls here. For beers they may be doing this and then we can go down to dock and buying some powder, yes?

And so we call around the girls and they come catwalk model stepping around to us, each one looking as if they've become aware of the future they will have and that anything they want will require them to drop their pants and suck the pink meat stick.

And Kimi, standing like some deity, like David with his dick out, says to the girls, You girls take cock for some beers, yes.

They fain some disgust at this, spit out chewing gum, and tell us to fuck off, but continue to stand there considering the offer, waiting for maybe a better offer to come.

You girls want cock for beer and maybe a gram too? Good stuff, freshly cut (by freshly cut what Kimi actually means is that it is flour mixed with sugar and glitter).

Let's see it, Scarface says, and we have them. We show the girls the beers, show them the white stuff, and they drop their knickers and I last all of about thirty seconds up her newly feeling but slack hole. Kimi keeps on pounding whilst my girl, Scarface, cleans herself up using the sleeve of her tight fitting jacket and she doesn't look how I feel and that is the story of my sex life. Her eyes are wide though, she's more spaced out than I thought she was and when she talked at me I couldn't understand a word she said. She could have been saying rape, or grape, or love or hate, or what the weather was like, or that I had a small dick and was a shite lay. I have no idea nor did I care.

Kimi finally climaxed in a fake rage yelled all in Scandinavian and the girl is sweating and I think maybe crying as it all may have been an act about her loving it up the arse but it is too late for that. Kimi had a big dick, not one suited for ass fucking, but that didn't stop him and she will never shit again without thinking of the damage he has probably done.

Both girls sway over to the beers and the white powder and they take swigs of the hot stale flat liquid and scream bloody fucking murder and one of them pulls out a fag butt and the other one throws up, literally pukes over her own shoes and it comes out of her nose as well as her mouth it great hot streams. Before they realise what the white powder is we are both running down the street laughing our little heads off. Kimi isn't running as fast as he could, his cock was still hanging out, and drips of brown stained cum dripped from the tip of his helmet onto the cracked pavement. It was the most disgusting thing I had ever seen, but by fucking Christ did I laugh at him.

Later that night we both stood atop the scaffolding that wrapped itself around the Welfare building (the same scaffolding that he had tried to jump off from when Kimi realised that he wasn't pregnant). We are pissing down on passers-by whist he teaches me the Norwegian for ass fucking.

Boms Faen, Boms Faen, Boms Faen, we yelled from atop our metal made throne.

That next day was the last time I ever saw Kimi, he went home that day. Well, I saw him jump into the North Sea and start swimming. He looked like a good swimmer, he made it through the wash, through the high breakers, and out into the deep sea. Then he was a dot, and then he was nothing and I sat and watched the ships and felt the breeze on my face and threw stones into the rolling water.

I could almost taste the candy floss and over vinegered chips of my youth.

I wonder what Kimi is doing now.

And then my life spiralled out of control. Kimi was gone, I had nobody and nothing. Nothing to my name, nothing inside of me but rotten shit. And that absence of everything let in the demons, I had space for them, for many of them. I didn't realise Kimi had protected me from so much that was out there wishing harm upon my weakened and fragile being. Much of that nothing in my life I don't really remember. I have fragments of memories, little slithers of moments smashed together, held together with sellotape and spit. All manner of drugs and pills forced into my body, be they crushed up, injected, inserted, sniffed, or drank, they all went in. One of those, some of that, two of them, a needle in there, a chug of that. You name it, I probably had it. I became quite the connoisseur of pills. A drug wizard. A conjurer of nightmares, an injector of dreams. If it was available I took it, I drank it, I snorted it, I inhaled it, I jacked-up with it. My body was the opposite of a dispenser. My mind abused, my veins violated. I knew what I was doing to myself, what my end game was. It was a game with very little rules and with an easy victory to be had, but for some reason I struggled to win outright. Something, perhaps an inner survival instinct, kept me alive, though my alive wasn't worth being alive for.

I kept on drinking too, after all, the body needs nourishment to survive. Food it can pretty much do without, but liquids it needs. Like a machine needs oiling from time to time so I needed my own oiling so that I could stay lubricated and functioning.

I knew of three people in this time that wasn't really time. These three people and I were always together, in the burnt out holes and torn down ramshackle warehouses fit for nothing but people like me and them. Those places were only known to the dealers, the vagrants, the police, the hookers, and the despots. These homes were grey coloured pits, beige infested gloom dens filled with soggy mattresses, itchy blankets, dead or dying bodies. They stank of unwashed life, grimy grease food, and blood. You couldn't have anything that was yours, it was owned en masse and you either gave it up freely or it was taken anyway.

I stole anything to get what I needed. Simple as that, I didn't care what I took or whom I took it from, and you would do the same. You think you wouldn't you self-righteous pricks, but when it comes to it, really comes down to it, when those little Judges on your shoulder start sticking hot piss covered needles into your eyes and your spine hurts and your arms itch and the skin on your cock feels like fire and you piss acid and shit rotten apple sauce and it's all blurry until you inhale something or drink something or pop something, you have absolutely no idea what it is like to want, to need, to must have beyond all things that exist. If there were too many more of us - junkies that is - in this world, then the Earth would kill itself, consumed in a haze of stagnant puddles of piss and vomit stained sofas, miles of empty Pot Noodle cups would be all that is left to tell of our part in the downfall.

I slept under cardboard. I slept under plaster board. I slept inside of pipes like a character in a Steinbeck novel. I slept outside under awnings to protect myself from the freezing rain. I walked the streets during the days. Hot or cold, wet or dry. I scurried in the shadows, ran past you with shards of glass, and I cut your legs so you couldn't run away and then I'd take what I wanted. I'd lift your phone, that tiny metal plastic glass contraption you have glued your lives too. You treat those things like they are your third arm, your second brain, and your fucking wife or husband doesn't get a look-in anymore thanks to that crazy little piece of shit that sends cancer ridden radio waves into your brain. I takes it all away and sells it. I take your wallet, your purse. I empty them out and throw it back at ya unless its leather and then it's off to the pawn shop I go with it. All that finery you have, those pictures of your children, your wife, they are as dispensable to me as I am to you. I take your shiny stuff, then off to the pawn shop I go and the few quid I get I instantly buy some powdered shit with and then I'm snorting quicker than you can scream for help. Anything that aint worth anything gets thrown into the creek or put in the fire bins to keep me warm. Fingers get so cold in the winter and your finest helps keep them warm.

I was the percentage that the Government warned you about. I was the man in the police drawings that you recognised but dint know where from. I was the fingerless gloved heckler, the dirty stinking low life you shunned and left for dead on the street corner. I was you, just in a different set of circumstances.

There seemed little point to my existence back then. I cannot deny that I did exist and that I wanted to go on existing until the laws of thermo-dynamics killed me off and I returned to the earth. I have little to no memories of that time. Just faces that flash before my eyes. Faces of terrified people as I take everything they had and chuck most of it away. Maybe I was pulling a massive whitey and all of what I remember is just my brain trying to recover from some overdose induced coma that I am about to wake up from. Like I said, those faces, the faces of those that I interacted with, are the only thing that makes me feel as if it wasn't a whitey I was pulling and that what happened actually happened. But even those faces have started to fade from my weakened memories, like cordial in water, just the colour and taste remains of those faces, the original thick liquid of their essence has gone.

One face, however, is always with me. Was always with me now that I come to think of it, I just never realised it. That face is a girl's face, a pretty round face, and she's got red hair, and big eyes that blink in the glare of the sunshine. Little freckles dot her cheeks, she has eyelashes that seem to cause waves of hot air to wash over me. She had ribbons in her hair, a daisy hairband that was as bright as the sun, it sparkled like the stars, I could imagine an entire universe in her glitter speckled hair band. She wore nice dresses, with flowers or cats on them, she always looked happy, always bouncing, and smiling as she walked down the road. She never took a brolly when it rained. Never ran in a storm.

I watched her for days, for weeks, for months, for probably years. I was attracted to her in a way that went beyond sexual, went beyond the need I had for the drugs that I depended upon. She had become a new amphetamine. It transcended anything that any man has ever felt toward a woman. I didn't want to assault her or anything like that, I just wanted to be with her, have a life with her, be one with her, and her one with me. I was the hotdog to her hotdog bun. We had to be together for each of us to fulfil our life's ambition. It was a solid state affirmation that I had to go on, to not go on meant that she wouldn't be there with me.

I would see her everywhere, occasionally she would leave me some money in my biscuit tin. I wouldn't spend that money, I just kept it in my pocket, and at night when I was alone, save for all the vagrants around me, I rubbed it between my fingers like it wasn't real and rubbing it, touching it, made it real and therefore she was real and not some delusion I was conjuring up so that the drugs could keep their home inside of me. It was like a first love, how I thought about her, no that that's wrong, it wasn't like anything I had ever felt before and I can't explain it, what I felt that is. Perhaps mankind has not grown enough to explain that level of yearning for another person. I thought of no other woman, only her, her hair, WOW, her hair, and her eyes, and the way she walked, and she never walked with a man or a woman, always her and always alone and her hand was always by her side and it was slightly open as if it wanted another hand, my hand, to grip, to caress, to be with and I so much wanted to hold her hand in mine, to rub her thumb with mine, to feel her pulse and her heat in my hand.

I remember the first time she spoke to me...

You look like you need this more than I do, and she knelt before me, was not repulsed by me, and she handed over her half eaten ham and cheese sandwich. I looked into her eyes when she handed it to me, time seemed to catch its breath, her fingers inches from mine. I could feel a static building up inside of me. I wanted to say thank you, but I couldn't, my throat was dry, and my mind was swimming with sharks. All I could do was smile and take the sandwich. I watched her go and when she was gone I slunk back into the shadows and I smelled the gift she had given me and her sweet perfume was there, as well as the stink of cheddar cheese and ham, and I continued sniffing that sandwich until the perfume had gone and when it was all used and inside of me like a memory, I ate that cheese and ham sandwich and it was the best thing I had eaten in a lifetime of lifetimes, maybe one of the only things I hadn't eaten in a lifetime of lifetimes. There was something in that sandwich, something in the way she had given it to me, the look in her eye, the angle of her face, I don't know, whatever it was it made me want to change, to become a better person, to stop what I was doing and become the man I was before I saw my brother fuck my wife in a hotel room. That man was a good man, well what I can remember of him was good, anyway.

For her, the girl I did not know the name of, I wanted to go clean. Stop the drink and the drugs. I could tell she wouldn't really like that about me. And I did stop, well, not fully clean, but almost, close enough for a prize and a pat on the shoulder. Days and weeks went by with me struggling through the thick soup of a clean, sober life. The oxygen I inhaled felt thicker, my lungs heavy with it. My body felt weighed down, as if gravity was pulling down on me with more and more force each day. Before long it I would be flattened by the weight of all that I had put on my shoulders, the weight of sobriety.

But I was doing okay.

I was doing okay.

I

WAS

DOING

OKAY...

I kept telling myself that I was doing okay. A little mantra that my lips and throat mumbled every minute of the day until my throat became sore and I couldn't cough without blood coming up and choking me. My skin had become transparent, my mind a bag of rusty nails that rubbed together with an eye watering screech that I am sure other people could hear, but I was doing okay, all that was happening was just the poison coming out of me, seeping from my open dirty pores. I could see the sunshine through the fog now, my eyesight had returned and things were a little brighter. But then that little Judge started pestering me again. Telling me the things I should do to her, which I would do to her unless I started taking again. That pesky little wig wearing bastard. Whisper, whisper, whisper. Talk, talk, talk. Moan, moan, moan. At first they were words of comfort, words of encouragement. Then they turned nasty, words that brought me down. He started to speak the truth. A truth that said that I wouldn't make it through this sober patch and my fall from grace would be massive. And he was right, after a time I knew that he was right. But he shared with me a secret. A way off this dreaded future he had pictured for me. All I had to do was little bits. Little bits of this. Little bits of that. Not the gargantuan mother loads I used to take, oh no, just little bits and you will be fine, able to carry on with life, and the girl you love will be none the wiser. I didn't want to do those things but keeping hold of what I truly wanted to do was impossible. A sober life is so hard, it's impossible when the nod is so much more inviting. So I took again, just little bits, but those little bits fucked me over like the Judge had fucked me over. I started following her and doing nothing else but sitting in the rain thinking about her and thinking about her and thinking about her which made me think bad things to do to her and I could see me with her and we were naked and I was up inside her and she wanted me so much we would fuck everywhere and my brother being dead couldn't ruin that and we would fuck and be together forever and ever until my bones turned to dust..... All that, her and the drink and the little bits and the Judge, they were all thinning me out, all of it was.... all of it was killing me, and not slowly this time, death was coming up fast..... And one afternoon it got too much, that fucking Judge with his gavel and his forever moaning, and thoughts of her her her her, and my brother and my stupid bitch mother and my ex-fucking-wife and the drink and the drugs and where I was and what I was doing and the dirt on my hands and the black shit that was under my finger nails and the way that my toe nails curled up and the skin on my arms that was as pale as the thinnest cotton and I wanted no more of it and the Judge showed me what I should do to take it all away and I was so fucked and God I believed him and I believed him and I believed him and he was a dirty fucking stinking liar but I didn't know that then and my eyes hurt all the time but now, because of the lies, I could see what I wanted in her, what I truly wanted to do to her, and all those beautiful thoughts of wanting to be with her went away and the base programme of mankind kicked in and it was all about fucking, fucking, fucking, so I followed her home and charged in after her and I grabbed her and pushed her to the floor so hard that I heard her head crack on the wooden flooring and it was a disgusting sound, it sounded wet and I knew I had done some damage, but what the fuck did I care so I took all I could carry and she squirmed so much and screamed so high that I had to shut her up and so I put my hands over her mouth as I raped her because I had to release this fucking demon that was up inside of my head and digging a hole inside of me that would eventually kill me and I kept my hands there until I was done and she was quiet and she kept quiet and I thought that she was quiet because I had finished my filthy and abhorrent needs upon her and when I took my hands away they were covered in blood, dark red blood, thick like PVA glue, and it wasn't mine, it was hers, and it was pouring out of her mouth and she was gasping for air and I didn't know what the fuck was going on until I lifted her head up to say sorry and to try and stop whatever it was from happening and I saw the shard of glass I had used to threaten her with slip out from the side of her throat and I knew it had happened again, I had done it again, I had killed again, and I ran I ran I ran and I started using heavy again and drinking anything again and this time it was a feverish consumption of everything rotten that I took into my body and I tried to drown her out, her voice, her eyes, her smile, her dresses, her touch, her scent, her blood, her screams, her death, tried to rid myself of the truth of what I had done, the reasons why I had done it, the urge to save her when I knew I had harmed her, but it was no good. No drug can take something like that away, only the drug of suicide, but that never once crossed my mind because I was so self-invested in my own survival. I was a fucking coward.

I was spiralling closer to an end. It was coming. Like a train without a driver...

I could feel that train every day rattling closer toward me...

Choo-Choo, it's time to go...

Its time you came with me...

Choo-Choo...

It's time to go...

But I would not go to the station.

I would miss that fucking train.

I did eventually climb out of the bottle. I did eventually stop taking everything. It wasn't a moment of clarity or some divine intervention or an awakening or anything like what the would-be-do-gooders like to take credit for. I just met a guy one day in the park. It was three in the afternoon, or that's what my watch told me. We sat and chatted, two drunks, two users deliberating all that is and was and will be. Both of us sat in the crisp autumn air whilst the world changed from a deep sentient green to the deep red/brown of decay. Have you ever seen that? Have you ever seen the world change from one season to the next? Nah, I thought not. It's beautiful. Truly beautiful. I can't describe it, it's a reminder that the world is turning, that we are more than just carbon based life forms sat on a rock floating in the middle of a bunch of nothing.

At that moment of my life I was close to death, the closest I think I had ever been. You could smell it on me. I was remembering my past with far better clarity, my wife would often visit me in my dreams, my brother would talk to me from time to time. I would answer back to him and he didn't much like the answers I gave him but that was always the case with him, the truth often hurt, that is why he liked to fabricated his own realities. The girl I killed was also there, in the shadows of my nightmares, in the shadows of my waking days. She never said anything to me, she didn't have to, the cut around her neck and the bruise on her face were all the words I needed. She was with me that day in the park, sat across from me, on the other park bench, and she was watching me as though she knew what was about to happen.

So, sat in the park with this tramp and halfway through a heated discussion about some shit I don't recall I remembered that I had a daughter.

I stood up.

I didn't excuse myself from the conversation, much to the annoyance of the other attendee.

I headed to my previous home from my previous life in my threadbare trousers and mock leather jacket. I had no idea where I was, but I knew how to get home. For some reason I always knew how to get home, I had just never needed to remember that until that moment.

I had a daughter you see, though I hadn't seen her in years and I couldn't remember her face, but I was sure she had one because she once kissed me and said goodnight when I was so drunk I couldn't string two words together. That was a New Year's Eve party back when I was married to a woman who hadn't betrayed me, who hadn't ripped my soul out and thrown it in the fire and then wiped the spunk off with a towel.

She was my daughter not his. I remembered that once she was ill as a child and we had blood tests, and I and her were a match, a clean and clear beautiful match, and why had I only just remembered that, why couldn't I have remembered that before I did what I did and ended up where I ended up?

I ran home, then stumbled, then plodded the drunkards plod. The streets were foreign to me but I knew my way around them. I saw a familiar house, it looked different to when I last visited it but that was some time ago and since then that house had been through winters and summers without a caretaker's kind hand to help it out. But that wasn't the house I needed, I needed the other house. The other place I knew of but had no idea how I knew of it. It's just there, up in my brain, like the chemical makeup of Ketamine (C13H16ClNO) was up there, the image of that place I needed to go to swam about and its image flashed in front of me like an H hit stabs you in the front brain and leaves you stone cold transfixed for hours and hours.

It had been raining that day, oil from something mechanical and sick had dripped along the pavement and it guided me to where my daughter lived. Rainbow puddles splashed beneath my feet, all I could think of was my daughter, I couldn't picture her, or see her, or think of her doing anything, all I could think of was the word daughter and try and conjure up a feeling to go with it.

Daughter...

Daughter...

Daughter......... And then I could see her. Swimming in the sea. We had a holiday in such and such a place and there was a beach and it was empty apart from me and her and my daughter. With memory comes feeling and with feeling comes memory and smells of the sea come too and I can feel the wind on my face and smell the salty sea air and the coconut suntan lotion my wife wore. The sand beneath my feet. The touch of my daughters hand as we waded out into that wide blue vastness of water and my sweet beautiful girl looking up at me and I could see the wonders of the world deep within her eyes, I could see the determination she had to endure the cold salt water and the lapping waves and the pull of the sea as it drifted back and all the time she held on to my hand so tight, so tight that I wanted her to hold it tighter so that I knew she wouldn't ever leave my side but it was me that left her side...That was the first memory I had remembered in a long time. I wondered what my daughter looked like now that she was older, I hoped it wasn't like me, and more like her mother instead. Her mother was beautiful, but aren't they all when they are on all fours and saying that they love you.

The world drifted over me. People got out of my way, even the rain moved aside, even the clouds floated away above my head, but yet the sky darkened and my eyes became heavy, my thoughts fused together into one lump of confusion. I could feel a hangover coming. A hangover that could spell death, it was close and I wanted death to fuck off, leave me alone, I didn't wanted to die anymore, not without seeing my daughter again.

I thought that I wasn't going to make it. I stopped beside a bus stop and my body rejected a deep rot that was held deep inside of me and I vomited up that filth over the shoes and bags of the people that sat there. They all jumped back in disgust, kids ran off screaming, an old lady looked at me the way old people do when they hate the world they have grown old into and realise that the twat puking up in front of them is the one that will help them in their time of need.

Relieved of that bit of me I moved on.

And I kept on going. Belly aching, throat burning, my head whirling and twirling like a bird caught in a storm. People everywhere all in my way, puddles and wet feet and soaked trousers and sweating hard in my thick winter coat. The journey never seemed to end, the road went on and on and there was no horizon just city and people and cars and trucks and busses and the sounds of trains and planes and market men selling apples for a pound a dozen and people doing their best to get out of my way but leaving millimetres of themselves in my way which was enough for me to stumble and tumble...

...I reached the house I needed.

The terraced house where my daughter lived.

It looked different from when I was last there, if I ever was there. The door used to be red, but then it was blue. The windows were wooden and grand, now they are the white plastic of a thousand houses. It's still a house, but it doesn't look like a home. Not the home where I and the woman that was my wife raised the child I was there to see. No, that's wrong, we didn't raise her here, she raised her here. I had gone, left the picture, joined the streets, they came here to be away from where we had been, to start a new life. I can't blame them for that, I would have done the same

I knocked on the front door and wiped the sweat from my forehead and adjusted my top so that I looked semi decent. I could feel the poison I had been drinking drip from my skin and dribble from my mouth, it leaked from my eyes, and seeped from the very tips of my hair. I stunk. I should be in a cage and pelted with rotten cabbage leaves. My hand hurt from knocking the door, my knuckles reddened, my clenched fingers turned white, I could see my veins popping out, they were reaching out for a needle to pierce them.

There was no answer. I knocked the door harder and pressed the door bell and the ding-dong reminded me of the thousand times that I should have heard it. I should have been on the other side of that ding-dong, answering the door to postmen with parcels, to would-be boyfriends, to Chinese food delivery men, to the man that wanted to marry my daughter...

...I heard a movement. Then there came a sudden realisation spiking in my brain that I am a drunk, a fucking no good street bum who must look like a turd dragged through a car park full of needles.

What the hell was I doing there?

Oh yeah, for my daughter.

The door opened. A man stood in the doorway. For a split second he is me and I am him and I saw myself for what I had become and I was angered and disgusted but then I am me again and I have to explain why I was there to this bloke who looked as if he was about to get mugged.

I'm looking for my daughter.

You what?

My daughter. She lives here... I...

Think you've got the wrong address mate.

No, no, she lived here with me, with me and my wife. Well my ex-wife, I moved out a while...

Look, mate, your mistaken, you have the wrong house, try the neighbours or something.

No, please. I can prove it. There is a dent in the kitchen door. I did that with a bowl of fruit. The garden has a wobbly wall and a rose bush and a tree in the back and oh yeah, yeah, the tree has my, no, our names on it. We scratched them in there with a knife. Please, you have to let me see my daughter. Is she in, she must be, it's raining.

Listen mate, I haven't got a clue what you are talking about. I've lived here for six years so piss off before I call the police.

No, please, wait, hang... hang on hang on a minute, I got that wrong, I didn't live here, no, that all was in the old house, please though, they did live here, my wife and my daughter, they moved here to get away from me...

Listen, pal, get the fuck away from my house... then the man in the doorway pushed me away and I slipped backwards and almost fell down the small set of stairs that I didn't know were there or remembered climbing up either that day or in the past. The door slammed shut and the door knocker rattled a brassy call. An emptiness was building up inside of me, trying to tear itself out of my guts. I protected my belly from the attack and for a while it felt as if I could stop it. I heaved, dry heaved, with nothing but spit dribbling from my ulcerated mouth. She wasn't there, but I knew, I knew for certain that she must be there or near there. This is where she lived, the brain I have tells me so. The memory I have of someone telling me about this place is fresh. The letter I have in my pocket, a letter with her name written in that computer generated type is evidence I didn't know I had until I just thought of it, there, hunkered in the gutter dry heaving next to a Ford Mondeo estate that's a faded blue and covered in rust.

The wind blew, it smelt of pending rain, and then I realised that it was raining, hard, but not hard enough for me to worry about.

Where could she be?

I knew I knew the answer, but I couldn't get it. It was there, on the tip of my tongue, at the edge of my thoughts, but I couldn't stretch far enough to get it. I had seen this address on a letter, on an envelope left for me to find so that one day I could be saved, so that one day I could see her again if only for a moment. My daughter. My saviour.

Excuse me, these are yours I think.

An old lady who looked like someone I should have known handed me a bunch of letters. She was stood in front of me but I couldn't tell if she was real or not. She was so familiar I didn't think she could be real, but I took the letters and I rubbed them between my fingers and smelt them and they smelt like a letter should smell. There must be over a fifty letters held together with a big red elastic band. Some of them had turned a weird yellow colour, others looked as if they were posted only a few days previous. A quick flick through, as if they were part of some elaborate flick book, showed me that some weren't the generic bill type letter. There were a few that looked hand written. They were all addressed to me, they had my name on them. They were getting wet and splotches of rain was causing the ink to run so I put them in my jacket pocket as if they were wads of cash. I didn't want to lose those letters, all of a sudden they had become the most precious thing to me. Like the ring was to poor old Sméagol, and look what happened to that poor bastard. They were, are, clues to the years I had spent in the bottle, scars of the truth that haunted/haunts my dreams, the reason why I run/ran, why I don't face the facts of what I did.

It's good to see you're still alive, the old woman informed me.

Yeah, I suppose it's good to be alive, though I might drown out here, hahahahaha.

Do you want a cup of tea? You look like you need a cup of tea.

Hahahahaha, but she wasn't telling me a joke. She actually wanted to make me a cup of tea. Okay, I can't remember the last time I had a cup of tea. Do you have sugar?

Well of course I have sugar. Now come on in before you fall into your own sick.

And the old woman took me into her house which was as familiar to me as my own shadow. I followed her in, the wallpaper making me spin with sickness. I knew this place. I knew her, but it seemed a long ago memory that was coming up to the top of my frazzled brain. The smell was the same as something I had smelt before, a scent of childhood, a stink that formed a thousand unfamiliar memories.

Go into the front room, I shan't be a minute, and I did and I sat in a chair that was a little too comfortable. I sat there, sucked into the fabric, I could see myself in the reflection on the T.V screen. This room has seen my reflection before, I thought to myself. The walls and the floor and carpet and the mantelpiece and the fake coal fire it's all stuff I had seen before, like reading through a catalogue for the third or fourth time, it's a new familiarity that is disconcerting and I would very much of liked to have stood up and left and gone back out into the rain and found a corner to drink myself to death in.

The woman came back in, and she carried with her two cups of tea which shook in her hands. She sat opposite me, placed her cup on the table and I could see she didn't want to stare but she didn't have much choice and her eyes watched me, scanned me, trying to clarify whom I am to her.

The cup was warm, it was a fresh sensation. The smell wafting up was sour and sweet and it reminded me of a past I can't remember clearly but know that there were cups of tea there and those cups smelt as that one did, and those cups were drank from like this one was being drank from. There were other cups in that house too, maybe not there now, but there was once others. I remember a Transformers mug with hot chocolate bubbling inside of it, a Thundercats plastic cup brimming with sharp orange juice.

You've been gone a long time. Thought you were dead. We all did.

All?

Well, yes. You may have forgotten but they didn't, she took a sip of her tea, I mimicked and the taste was everything I had wanted it to be, she went on, The house was sold, they moved away but they never gave up looking. Maybe if your brother was there to help it would have been different.

My brother is dead.

Yes he is. And I know it was you, but I didn't say anything. They asked me if I thought it was you, if that's why you were running, but I always said no. They thought I was hiding you away. Keeping you safe.

Me, you think it was me? You don't even know me. I had already left anyway.

Jesus, what has happened to you?

We stared at each other and to me it was plainly obvious who I was and what had happened to me.

But you hadn't left, well not the country like the police thought. She told me everything. About the disk you left, about her and your brother. We didn't tell the police, we both kept quiet, though for her to keep her mouth shut cost me my pension.

Why?

We wanted you back.

No, why did it cost you your pension?

She smiled and scratched at the wrinkled skin on her arm, You know the answer to that. Plus the daughter of yours needed things like clothes and food and school books.

We both sipped at the sweet tea. I struggled to put together what was happening, nothing was computing, it was all just events strung together to form other events. I was hot and cold and wet and dry and itchy and my throat hurt and my eyes, fuck me, I just wanted to tear them out and scratch them into pieces.

She stood up, her legs clicked an arthritic cry. She grabbed hold of a photo from the mantelpiece and handed it to me and as she did that she looked down at me, deep down inside of me, and then let go of the picture and sat back down.

I put my cup of tea on the floor.

I looked at the photo and had to rub my eyes, the world smeared into and out of focus.

I looked, again, at the photo. There were two boys in it. One taller than the other but not by much. In the background was a tractor, all red and shiny. The two boys looked happy to be next to it. It looked like a hot day, both boys wore shorts and had thin t-shirts on. The tall boy wore a blue and white striped t-shirt that I knew was a Nike top even though there were no labels to be seen. The smaller boy wore an A-Team t-shirt. Both boys were smiling at me and I smiled back. That had been a good day. A country steam fair in the middle of some forest. Mum and Dad took us in the silver blue Cortina that had beige velour interior and smelt of bacon flavoured Frazzles.

We had ice-cream afterwards, I told the woman opposite.

Yes, we did. That was a good day.

This is home then. This is where it all started and shall finish.

Yes, it is. A lot of memories in this house, memories I couldn't let someone else have. Do you remember much, growing up here with your brother and me and your father?

Not really. You weren't much of a mum, so I remember that much.

She finished off her tea and with a shaking hand placed the cup back on the table. her lips were pursed together like she had sucked the worlds sourest lemon.

I suppose not. I have thought about those days for a long time. They make me feel bad but I can't change what I did. I won't apologise either, I can see you don't need that. It was a difficult time for all of us.

Difficult time? No it wasn't, I was ten, I was a kid for fucks sake and you were an adult, you were about my age and you were like me, a fucking drunk with nothing better to do except you did have something better to do, you had me, you had a family.

That's not what I meant. It's pointless me explaining what I was going through, what I needed and didn't get from you or your father or your brother.

We fell silent, lost in the images of what each of us was thinking but didn't want to say.

Can I have this picture?

Yes. So you're going then? You don't want to try and get things sorted with me and you?

Fuck off. Truly, fuck off and fucking die. I don't want to be here. I hate this place and I think I hate you, I have never really thought about hating you until right now. You can't even say sorry for all the things you did to me. Anyway, I want to find my daughter. Do you know where she is? You could at least give me something of use in my life.

Is, what do you mean, where she is?

I want to see her.

What for? What the hell could you be to her now?

I took the photo out of its frame and placed it into my jacket pocket, Do you know where she is? I asked that looking straight at her, I spat the words out at her, I didn't want to be in there, I could feel it all bubbling up again and to stay there.......

She's dead.

What?

She's dead. She was killed in a robbery. They never found out who did it.

But I have this letter, this letter right here, and I took out the letter I had found that was addressed to her and I held it out and I saw that it was smeared with dried blood and then the face that that letter had once belonged to came smashing its way into my thoughts and I thought I will burn, oh God I am going to fucking burn, because it all came back so hard, so fast, I couldn't stop it but I tried but I couldn't stop it coming, like I couldn't stop the blood pouring from the wound in her neck, oh fuck God no, that sweet little neck I used to blow raspberries on, that sweet little neck I once held in one hand and had cradled her head as she fell asleep....

My mum looked at the letter as I sat there incapable of anything but thinking of the girl I had killed.

Oh my God. You... You killed...

I jumped up and ran. I ran out of that house and out into the rain and head first into the wind and the people, and everything I didn't want to be around was all there and she followed me, not my mother but my daughter, she followed me no matter where I turned and I didn't look back even though I could hear my mum calling my name, calling my name, calling my name and then that voice changed and I could her my little girl calling my name but she is saying Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, and then nothing but the wind whistling in my ears and the rain stung me, it was cold and the days went by with me running and running and hearing her voice crying for her Daddy and in those dark days and darker nights that followed I ran away with everything I had, I ran until I was no longer me, though the memories of what I did stuck to me, and I could never erase them no matter what I did and maybe that's fair. Maybe that's fair considering what I did.

I will not die for what I have done, but I will wear those memories until the day I die, and continue to hate myself no matter what good I think I have done. To me, my punishment for what I did is staying alive and seeing it with my mind's eye every time I close my eyes.

But before all that, before I realised that living was my suicide, I left the city. I left all that I had become back there in the streets, in the cars, in the people, in the lamp posts, in the bins, in the pavements, in the car parks, in the high streets, in the smog, in the ferries, in the busses, in the trucks, in the tramps, in the users, in the hidden, in the junkies, in the thieves, in the lonely, in the graveyards and in the shit of that place. Much of what I left behind in the city that I grew up in I don't even think I knew existed in that half state I was in. My thoughts were focused purely on my daughter, not on survival at that point. I wanted to die but I didn't have the balls to go through with it properly. It was none of that cry for help shite that all the experts go on about. I did want to die, but I was scared of what dying meant. I would stand on bridges over motorways overlooking the rushing traffic beneath me. Even that far above the motorway I could feel the wind hitting me, the cars turbulence a violence generated from almost nothing. Falling, how I would have fell from that bridge, arms out wide reaching out for deaths hand. The crushing, squashing impact should be instant, but what is an instant? Every second is made up of millions of events. A million tiny little things happening quicker than we can see, one single movement, grabbing a cup or scratching your arm, they are made up of billions of tiny little interactions of things that aren't even real until they are performed or are viewed by us. The more I thought about this, focused on the mundane acts we undertake each day, I could no longer believe in the instant end that death promised. For all I knew I could be hanging in that painful state between life and death for a moment that stretched out for a lifetime.

On a bridge high above a motorway, my slight frame lit up by hundreds of orange lights, the wet air whistling about me and my breath vaporising before my eyes, I remembered Doug. The Falklands War veteran, the drunk who no doubt is dead now. I should have been thinking of my daughter, of what hurt and pain I had caused her, but no, once again my mind played tricks on me. Remembering Doug forced an image of a log cabin into my head, surrounded by trees at the bottom of a valley, a great forest masking its existence from the rest of the world. I would have to head north to get there, it's a long way, I may die of exposure, hunger, withdrawal, and any number of such things, but all of those seem a far better option to me than chucking myself off a bridge or tying a rope around my neck. I stepped back from the handrail, the rush of the wind still drifting over me, the lights illuminating me with their dull glow, and I thought. I thought about me and my brother growing up, I thought about my mum and my dad and my wife and my daughter, and how they are all dead apart from the one that should have died and the one that wants to die. But then my need to die started to ease, like the drugs and drink were easing themselves out of my system. And as I sobered up, stood there upon a concrete structure connecting where I have been to where I was going, I stopped blaming myself and asked myself instead; who is responsible for those deaths? My mum? My wife? My brother? No. The answer was and still is, simple, it doesn't take much to come to it. I'm the one responsible. I was responsible for my acts, they were not preordained by some higher being, nothing that I did had been constructed by my mother.

So it turns out that it has always been my fucking fault. Always has been and always will be.

I walked away from the motorway, off the bridge and into the country.

I walked for days. Through hills and valleys I wandered, across ploughed fields and rutted roads I trudged along with a silent invisible weight upon my shoulders. The sun rose and it fell. I stole food and drank from rivers. I trapped rain in my plastic bottle and it tasted of metal when I drank it.

My shoes became threadbare, my clothes hung from my glass-like skin. Feet hurting, legs burning, muscles aching in my back. I itched all over, my blood felt thin and apt to run from the pores of my skin. The alcohol, the drugs, everything leaving me, completely now, not half-arsed like before, a full reset was occurring and my system was becoming cleaner with every breath, with every piss, with every squat. I had no further epiphanies, no moments of clarity, I was thoughtless as I trudged across our green and pleasant land.

I reached the forest as the heavens opened and rained down upon me and the winds whipped up about me and it was as if the forest wanted me to go in and to be saved from the storm that was starting up above and behind me. Autumn to winter was turning the land brown. I was beyond tired, I walked into the dark tree line a ghost in a dream.

Then I found the cabin and I found a home. On that day I cried until I could cry no more because I missed my brother and I missed my wife.

Most of all I missed my daughter and the life we could have had.

I have one bullet left.

What I am doing is illegal. Just add it to the list.

Last night I scratched the name of my daughter into the bullets brass casing. It was hard work. My hands shook and my head hurt with the strain, but I had the time, it's not like I had anything else to do last night except sit there and watch the stars twinkle in the forever midnight sky.

The day had started with four bullets. By lunchtime it was down to two and by the time I made camp it was down to that one pitiful lump which seemed to sum up my life in one single object.

The stink of cordite hangs around me. A cold air surrounds me now, like an unwanted arm placed around me at a funeral that you just want to brush off. It seems, no matter how close I put my body to the flames, it does me no good and I am still as cold as I was three weeks ago when the storm came and tore my little world that I had made for myself to shreds.

This morning I awoke with my sleeping covers covered in frost, the black tea in my mug had a thin film of ice covering it, and my breath was like a thick fog. I was warm in my covers, I didn't want to move as my head knew what my body was going to find out. I thought, back to when everything wasn't as it is now, that a Monday morning was a hard thing to wake up to. What I would give to wake up to one of those Monday mornings again. Though, if the offer did come along it would make me sick as I don't have much to offer anymore as a trade. And those feelings of what once was hung with me that first hour of the day as I ate my meagre breakfast and had another cup of blood warm pine needle tea that tastes like earthy shit, but that's all there is so it's either that or drink your own piss. As the sour muddy tasting stuff goes down my throat I think I am drinking a nice warm mug of sugary tea and that helps a little. If only other things in life could be so easily remedied with such pretending, such false pretences.

The sun rises, it must be at least seven, and so I pack my things and head off into the forest. My forest.

In the shadow of some great old tree I adjust and ready myself for another day of watching, another day of listening, another day of stalking... and most importantly another day of hoping. There is a silence all around me, there is no wind, the fragile frost bitten earth doesn't crack under my weight as it used to when I first came to the forest. There is no bird song, or rustling of dying leaves made by some small woodland creature. Even the river, which I know is out there, has fallen quiet. Perhaps the forest has finally welcomed me in, thinks of me as a friend, and it is helping me stalk my prey instead of hindering me as it used to.

Each breath I take is a grating fracture in the quiet I have become adjusted to but still find difficult to live with. Overhead, through the breaks in the branches, the sky has become paler, as if the life of summer is being overtaken by the deathly grip of winter. The sun is up but seems farther away, a yellow smear behind a Vaseline lens of ozone.

I sit and wait in my bush den, knees and calves burning. Time drags on, or at least I think it does, it's hard to tell in the deep forest.

She is out there. I can smell her. The wind is low but enough just to carry her scent. I am downwind of her so she will not smell me. And thoughts like that really get my back up as I'm no hunter, I'm no trained killer, just a chump with a gun and a shaking hand.

I hear her, walking away from me, stopping to chew the small sprouts of grass that have survived the first frosts. I have learned that before she eats she will sniff the air, trying to ascertain if it is safe to eat. I know her. I am almost her.

I move forward... slowly... so very slowly that my joints creak enough to wake the dead. It hurts to move like this, but I must do it or the last few days will be for nothing and I will probably starve.

The snow hasn't started to fall yet, I guess I should be thankful for that. I can feel that it is coming though. It's there, skulking in the west, teasing me with harsh winds and bitter frosty mornings that scratch at uncovered skin till it burns and aches. The clouds are low, weighted with what will become snow. The sky is grey, it looks sad, sad that summer has gone. I can remember as a kid, during those steamy hot summer days when all you seem to wear is a pair of shorts and wafer thin t-shirts, getting a dull ache in my gut when I looked at the black clouds hanging over the horizon like great whales. You could smell the thunder they held within them, sense it like a fly senses your oncoming hand, and that ache in my gut turned into a swirling vortex getting faster and faster until the cloud released its full anger and I went running home with flashes of light and rumbles of thunder screaming around me. Those days seem so very far away, a distant galaxy of life that I was once a part of and am now cut away from, unable to fix my world back to that world. Too much has happened, some of which I am unsure of, though I have memories of it all.

And there she is. Bigger than the other deer I have killed. Plump for the long haul of winter. Not as a big as a buck. I will not kill the bucks.

She doesn't know I'm here. Her head is down and she eats without a care. There is a moment when she looks over toward me, but her eyes aren't as good as mine and with the wind being as it is she lowers her head and continues to feed and she laps at the water that has pooled in a hollow tree stump. Steam rises from her flanks, in this light I can't help but admire the creature that I have trailed for three long, cold days.

But I must live.

The sun breaks through the clouds and for ten minutes it warms me as it must warm her. Together we bathe ourselves in what feels like the last heat of autumn, that little trickle of warmth that is a reminder to us both of what we aren't going to have for much longer and what we have to look forward to in the future. But between all that is winter. And winters out here are cruel parents that thrash you and beat you until you surrender and die crying.

Short breaths. Smooth motions.

Aiming the rifle that isn't mine I steady my body and notice that the shakes my hands were going through have gone and I feel hot and ready and get the feeling that this is it, this is the shot, and before I second guess myself I pull the trigger and all at once the forest is alive with the sounds of birds and trees and the river flowing over fallen logs and the gunshot lingers like the storms of my youth and my ears sing with it all and my heart is beating so fast I can feel it smashing against my ribs, causing blood to pump viciously around my body in motorway wide veins and there is a sound of a body slumping to the floor and my knees burn and my calves, God my calves, they are on fire and I stare down the gun sight not seeing anything but the vapour rising from my open mouth and the slanting God rays as the sun pierces the heavy clouds.

My lips and mouth are dry. My arms and feet and back and legs all ache as the weight of what I have been doing over the last few day's falls on top of me like a brick wall.

Now I have zero bullets left for my rifle, but at least my quarry lies dead on the frosty ground not twenty meters away.

It's not that far, back to my cabin that lies at the bottom of the valley. It takes me a while to carry back my kill. You try carrying a deer up and down hills on your shoulders with a hungry belly and a body that has been starved of sleep and nutrition for the last three days, its knackering. I don't arrive back till late on in the afternoon when the sun has started to dip and the world has turned orange. I let the beast fall to the floor, sit on the wooden steps that lead up to the porch. My porch I suppose as I don't rent this place and it seems as though I haven't seen a bit of money in years. My stubble is now an itchy, five days old, though it looks as though I haven't shaved in a month such is the skill in which I can grow a beard almost overnight. It is rough when I rub my face, too rough. I try to squeeze the tiredness from my skin, slap my cheeks to wake me up but all that does is hurt my face.

I suppose I'm going to have to cut you up before night sets in and the wolves sniff you out.

I undo the laces on my boots and wiggle my toes to free up a bit of space and it feels good and it would be easy to lean back against the post and drift off to sleep but I can't get caught up in all that yet. There is work to be done. Dirty, smelly, bloody work.

By the time I am done the sun has set and the stars shine in the dark blue sky and the deer is no more than a heap of bones, a mound of guts, and a pile of sweet meat. I salt the meat and put it away carefully as that will have to last me for a while. I have a cage in the cabin, and in that cage is a cupboard that is air tight and keeps everything sealed in nicely. The bones and guts I scoop into a sack and walk about a mile toward the river and pour them out. It is dark now, but not so dark that I can't see where I am going. Maybe my eyes have gotten used to this, I am sure when I was back in the city, when it was city life night-time, I couldn't see for shit.

I follow the path of dirt, a path I have created just by simply walking over the same ground again and again.

A little way down my little path I can feel their eyes upon me and they stay with me whilst I do what I have to do and I know that by the time I am back home they would have consumed most of what I have given them and the rest will be picked off over night by the smaller foragers. We have a deal, me and the big eaters: eat what I don't eat or I will kill you, it's as simple as that. But with no more bullets it will be tough for me to keep them at bay if they do decide to come at me. But that's a thought for another day.

It used to be hard, sleeping that is. I didn't really know what a dark night was until I slept in the forest. There is a presence with this sort of darkness. It touches you, sucks you in. Light pushes you away, the dark nights here swallow you up, they hold you tight, but not a lover's embrace, this is more like being smothered by a rapist. At first I fought against it and slept with a candle glowing on the table. But that seemed to make it worse because if you woke in the dead of night and the candle was out it seemed even darker. But now I don't think I could sleep with any sort of light on. Sleeping like that now seems foreign to me, alien, and I find it hard to remember a time when it was any different to how it is now. But this sort of darkness has a nasty side effect. One that sleeping with a light on never seems to have for me. It makes you think. It makes you remember things that you don't really want to remember. So now, with my eyes closed and trying to go off to sleep, I can see her. My memories of her are as crisp now as they were when she was here, well not here, not in the cabin with me enjoying the natural way of living that refreshes the soul. She never made it this far and that will always haunt me, that and all the other things like her face and her smile and her laugh and her clothes and her smell and the way she ran in the rain and skipped through puddles, everything about her for crying out loud, it will always haunt me. When I picture her, the first thing I always see is her bright orange hair. Christ it was glorious. Every strand of it seemed to be on fire. It wasn't ginger, it wasn't red or auburn. Maybe my mind has made it more colourful than it was but then again everyone used to comment on it, she was known for it in town, so I suppose maybe it was like I remember. I open my eyes and see nothing. I close my eyes and she is still there, stood in our little garden, looking up at the clouds and telling me something about them that back then I heard and took in and answered back but today I can't seem to put the right words together and what she actually said is lost. All I remember is that she told me something I didn't know and I thought that this was how it was going to be from then on but it never turned out to be that way and then that orange hair didn't seem so bright anymore and it stuck to me like seaweed and her eyes roll up into her sockets and her last breath is taken. All the fucking time it ends up with that image and it seems as though every time I think of her it ends up with me holding her and trying to tell her it's going to be alright but knowing that it isn't going to be alright and that it's never going to be alright because it is my fault she is dying, it's my fault that she is dead.

It's my fault my daughter is dead when it should have been me that died.

It should have been me.

The next morning is a grey corpse of a morning. I make a pot of pine needle tea and sit on the chair I made on the porch that I didn't make and watch nothing as it does nothing but be there and stay there for many years to come. I can hear the river flowing in the distance. It sounds wilder today than it did a few days ago. Today I have to journey to the river and fill the containers and then build a massive fire and boil the shit out of it just in case it is tainted with sheep piss.

Branches crack and snap to my right as something goes scampering away and I hear bushes flitter and flutter farther off and that reminds me to check the traps I have put out before the scavengers come. I should have done it last night but I just couldn't be bothered with it after the days upon days of hunting and that is going to be an issue as if I have caught anything then it is probably been eaten already and the whole exercise would have been a complete waste of fucking time. Either that or the meat would have started to rot and the blood curdle and then my winter's preparation would have to continue on and on.

The trees around me are still green, but up along the valley walls they are turning golden brown and soon they will be barren and the wind will pick up a little bit and their branches will sway and crack and the forest won't be as quiet anymore. I'm sure that on the horizon the tree line makes I can see white flakes of snow softly falling but that could be nothing but my imagination.

Hurling the steamy dregs of tea to the floor I head back inside and dress for the day. I have learnt that it's not about layers, it's about good thermals.

I walk to the river, skirting the pile of meat I left yesterday for the wolves and the only thing that now denotes its existence is the red patch and the torn up earth and the stink of piss. It doesn't take long to reach the river and overnight there must have been some rain further upstream as the waters are deeper than they have been in a while and they seem to be flowing a little quicker too. I fill the two containers which are no more than large buckets with plastic lids and place them on the bank and sit on top of one and watch the water bounding off rocks and frothing and swirling into tiny rapids. I have some idea where this river goes but I don't know where it starts. I didn't follow it to get here. I just stumbled upon it like everything else has been stumbled upon in my seemingly pointless life. All I know is that it has kept me alive for a year or more.

I sit here for some time, watching the water, watching the sky. I think that maybe I will make a fishing rod when the spring thaw comes and get a bit of fishing in. I saw fish in there, big fat ones too, but back then I didn't want to fish, plus I had bullets to spare and I was happy with the dried meat and the cereals and the grain and the heavy bread. But now that sort of food has become so plain, so boring, that a bit of fried fish seems almost sexual about now. My gran loved a bit of fried fish. Every Friday, without fail, fried fish, peas, and chips. Swore by it. Said that if she were to go without it then that would be the day she died.

She died on a Friday evening and funnily enough that day she did eat a bit of fish so it goes to show that what we want and what we get are two totally different things.

Minutes tick by whilst I watch the water, hours slither through my world leaving nothing upon my body but wrinkles and fresh ideas and images of the rod I could build. The whisper of deaths sweet release flutters in my ears but not as close as it has been in the past. I can feel an end coming, perhaps to my life, or to the life I have in the forest, I'm not too sure. I can see this life in the forest becoming a burden, a chore, but for the time being I am happy being out here in the nowhere of the world. I can't do any damage out here, well, I can, but it is only me that's affected by that damage. Perhaps I have already done too much, I cannot be the judge of that.

But a change is coming. I must make the most of my time here.

Sat on my bucket of cold river water I decide to make a fishing rod.

~

Being at ease with himself put him at ease with the world.

John Steinbeck, Cannary Row

