Adrenaline.
By Robert Young ©
Copyright © Robert Young 2013
(October 2014 Edit)
Robert Young has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
For Liz, who makes it all make sense.
Act I
Instigation
Chapter 1
The funniest part about it then was that the daytime was darkest. Although you’d have to have a pretty sick sense of humour to find it amusing.
I laugh about it now.
When I opened my eyes that first time they were still closed, or so it felt. There was darkness, but warmth too and pressure. For a time I just moved my head around thinking that my eyes would adjust soon enough but it just stayed black.
I remember lifting my hands up and feeling that weird sensation of being enclosed, then feeling the texture of the soft coarseness of the gauze around my hands and wrists, my eyes and face.
It isn’t every day you wake up a Mummy but sometimes dreams are fucked up and real and hard to tell from being awake. That time I just drifted off again, letting the actual dreams seep back in. Didn’t even occur to me to call out for someone, I was so tired and so far out of it.
It was nice not knowing for a time. Believe me when I tell you that ignorance is bliss.
But then when the dreams came back they plagued me and chased me. They were louder than I’d ever known, brighter and clearer. Terrifying in ways it is hard to describe to you now, if only because my dreams since then have been worse and more horrifying.
The sounds felt loud – not just in the way that you can normally perceive volume - but physically felt loud. As if they were passing through and into me. There were screams and voices – pleading, cursing, threatening and begging – there were thunderous booming explosions and ear-splitting keening, screeching wails that tore through my skull. Seemed to shear right through my bones into marrow.
There were blinding lights and blackness so total that there could be only void. There were faces and figures, people and animals. There was violence that defies recall or description and none of this has got anything but worse.
Eventually though, like with any sleep, it’s the outside that forces itself in again. Some external stimuli leaks into your mind and that horrible, insistent fire alarm you are running from but can find no escape, is just your alarm clock bleeping at you to get on with your life.
For me though the burning was real.
Have you ever had sunburn? Nasty, angry red Brits-in-the-Med sunburn that you can’t do anything about and that whether you lie down, sit still, lotion it up or cold shower it, it just keeps on tingling and sizzling?
That type of burn always feels like the skin is trying to get the heat out, like the burning is rising up. Emanating. This though, this felt the other way, like something hot was trying to force its way down into me, down through the pores and into the flesh, into the meat of me, into the core.
I cried through the second day and on the third I ran.
Chapter 2
The bandages came off on that third day. I was what they might have called a difficult patient through most of the daylight hours but things tended to settle at night.
By then I’d noticed the pattern of time passing, the fire on my skin raging for hours before cooling and then disappearing. When it had gone everything felt so normal, so good in fact, that it was almost possible to believe that the pain had been imagined. But then more hours would pass and the flames would leap in my flesh again.
I protested about removing the bandages. Awake for such a short time and often in such agony it seemed rash to me to take them off. But they reassured me that after so many weeks, it was high time to do this, to let the air in and the skin begin to heal itself more naturally.
The eyes, they said, would take a little longer; maybe another week or so. It was hard to say.
They all shuffled into what was obviously a private room. Screaming non-stop will get you things sometimes. A ward full of sick people needs sleep and don’t want to be reminded of any kind of horror or suffering. The nurse that spoke with me the previous evenings had managed to explain a few things but back then it all felt so surreal, so dreamlike, that even by the time the raging stopped in the evening I came to doubt myself again, begin to question what was wakefulness and what was dreaming.
‘How are you feeling Mr Laing? You seem much improved from this afternoon.’ The clipped accent, the rolled r’s suggested to me that my Doctor was Asian, Indian perhaps. He sounded small too, short and slight. I’d never noticed that before, how a sound or a voice can somehow invoke its other physical qualities; that narrower frame, smaller chest cavity. Maybe I just had some weird ideas running through my head, still delirious, still dreaming.
‘I feel much better thank you,’ I said. At least that was how the words formed in my mind even if it was not what my ears picked up. Even if I had heard it wrong though I could tell it hadn’t come out right. The words didn’t feel right on my tongue. They hadn’t formed properly in my mouth somehow, like I was drunk and just couldn’t hang syllables together. Drugged maybe? That must have been it. Pumped full of painkillers to numb all the burning.
So why the hours of pain? It couldn’t simply be that the dosage didn’t last, that they couldn’t top me up again within a certain timeframe. That might be what it said on the packet of ibuprofen from the chemist but it didn’t really matter that much did it? I’d taken three at a time on occasion when a hangover proved two-tablet-proof and lived to tell the tale.
I’d once had an abscess on my gums that swelled up so much that I couldn’t close my mouth properly and the pain was awful. The dental painkillers they prescribed were really serious pills – even the over-the-counter stuff doesn’t fuck around – but the effects don’t last as long as the stated dosage period. Every four hours? Forget that, I was sinking the next pair after three at most. Maybe I felt a little nauseous for overlapping the dosage but shit, what did that matter? It was either knocked out in bed by the pills not noticing the nausea or lying there in agony watching the clock. No contest.
Surely in a professional environment like this they could just keep hitting me with whatever I needed? Maybe they did but it didn’t work.
‘Better? You feel better? Good. That’s encouraging. We seem to be making progress although I do have concerns about your body temperature during the day. The fever seems to be especially high. But it has broken after a few hours over the last couple of days so hopefully we are getting things right.’
‘Do you feel hungry Mr Laing?’ The nurse this time. She sounded at once attractive but homely. Again, surely I was just investing her with my own perceptions, my projected expectations of this caring female figure that came to me when I screamed and begged and who tried to make me more comfortable, less scared.
‘Yes. Very hungry.’ Fucked if they heard that clearly but the beseeching tone can have been hardly more obvious.
I was as well, I was starving. Not in the way kids say it when they really just mean a bit ravenous, the way people who normally eat at seven, stand there waiting to be seated in a busy restaurant at eight tell each other they’re staaarving. That kind of hungry was nothing.
It had started last night, perhaps just because the pain had gone and my mind had something else to focus on. I guess if they were right and I had been unconscious for weeks then all my nutrition was coming through tubes and I had not eaten in a long time.
All I could think of then was food. Bowls of it, plates of it, entire tables spread with it. There was an avalanche of sense-memory, of images and flavours and aromas. Everything came in a rush and I could taste it all, smell the
richness of it, feel the textures in my mouth and my body craved and cried for all of it and more and now. Now.
‘Once we’ve done the bandages, then we’ll get you some dinner, ok?’ she said. Just get this minor agonising inconvenience out of the way and we’ll crack on with the beans on toast. No bother.
I thought I would vomit when they started; I protested noisily enough but to no avail and the anxiety was a very physical thing inside me, pushing at my skin, trying to get out.
But it’s one thing to be frightened because you’re in bandages in hospital, tired and disoriented, jumping one second from vivid memories of gorging yourself, immersed in the pleasure of indulgence, to a fear that your skin is going to peel right off with the bandages.
It is quite another to be a grown up, a rational human being, listening to the Doctor tell you calmly that after so long, there really should be nothing to worry about. That they have monitored my progress even when I wasn’t conscious, changed the dressings before. You hear that and you have to fight down the terror and trust them.
Because inside an hour I was bandage free and it felt extraordinary. I’m not a claustrophobic person at all but when the bandages came off it felt like I’d gone from a coffin to a cavern.
I could feel the space and openness around me, as though all the complex air currents swirling about were mapping the room around me, right onto my skin like contours. I could feel where the ceiling and the doors were, sense the people.
I could smell them too. That was new.
Chapter 3
Tall but stooped, smiling but hostile, Blake Roth had a bearing about him that one could never trust. That smile belied violence, always bubbling under the surface, close to erupting. That physicality always masked by a withdrawn, head-down stance.
In full flight, with his shoulders pulled high and square and the smile drawn tight into a snarl, he was a sight to behold. But that sight was saved for a very few unfortunates. He’d learned to be sure that when the monster sprang its cage, it was only the one or two who saw it. The one or two on the end of it. Bystanders were anything but innocent in Roth’s experience. Bystander was another word for witness.
He wasn’t what he was. Wasn’t what he had been a few years ago. Black hair shorn near to the scalp, earrings in both lobes, square cut diamonds. They had been diamonds too, though not paid for. Least not in cash. But no-one that looked at him in his cheap jeans, his fake Armani sweatshirt ever believed they were real. For some time it felt as though everything he had done to try to set himself apart from all the other fucknuts from the estate, the more he looked just like them.
Not enough to be invisible though. So when those bystanders outside the pub queued up to tell plod that they’d seen Roth start the argument and start the fight that night, and then finish it there was no escaping the six month custodial.
Two more years could not be ducked either a year after release because he had again been all too visible jumping the suit who had shoulder-barged him in the high street. All pin-striped and used-to-play-rugby the twat had obviously forgotten he was in Peckham and not Dulwich and Roth handed his fucking arse to him. In front of a dozen horrified late evening commuters.
They’d almost fallen over each other to testify against him that time. Gratuitous one of them had said. Savage another. Neanderthal.
Pricks. He’d spent the first month trying to remember what that bus queue had looked like and how it would have looked if he had laid right into the rest of the stuck up wankers.
The rest of the time he spent seeing the pattern that was developing. Six months had become two years. How long before he was doing a five or ten stretch just for twatting some city boy or knocking out one of those swaggering, teeth-sucking rude-boys from the towers?
Roth had not needed some Shawshank epiphany to see sense, not had some wise old head in the laundry room point out the error of his ways. Long, long hours on a bunk bed when it’s too hot or too cold or too fucking uncomfortable to sleep give you all too much time to reflect on your choices and see where they are taking you.
When the two years were done he got himself a new flat and a new job and a new haircut. He lost the earrings and the fake designer shit and now he just walked away from fights or the suggestions or possibilities or the merest whiff of fights.
You had to see through all the bullshit and you had to be the one who made decisions. So Roth told himself. Bumping your shoulder with some moron at a bus stop was not worth two years inside. Christ, he didn’t even know for sure whether the guy had meant it or not. And yet two years had been taken from him – no, surrendered – just because he couldn’t get through a day ignoring the occasional idiot.
Now of course, control was all. Pick your moment, pick your man, pick your place. Roth had lost none of that fire but now he knew better than to kick off in public.
Now he’d do it where nobody was likely to see and where he could keep it quick and efficient and profitable. One thing he couldn’t ignore was his capacity for violence. He could kick most people’s arses’, he knew that, and wasn’t scared of finding out. He knew plenty of big, strong guys, but the difference was, they were scared of fighting. Of the violence; the chaotic, anarchic nature of it. Not Roth. He positively thrived on that.
The ones that came back at you, the ones that fucking went for it, they were the best. Some just clung to their bags, their wallets. Curled up on the ground or tried to run. Others would square right up though, chins and chests out, ballsy and brave like they knew how to fight.
Adrenaline will give you that. Once it’s pumping, you get that sudden conviction that you’re invincible. Problem is, you need to know what to do with it once you have it and as with most things in life, it was about experience. Quite simply, Roth knew violence. Knew it intimately; how it tasted and smelled, how it felt on and under the skin. How it could stretch you out, fill you up. Most people didn’t. They saw black eyes and bruises and they read the stories of victims and of agoraphobia and jumping at shadows.
The ones that were frightened either faced that fear or gave in to it and those made easy pickings when Roth needed to earn. That night when he saw the suit hop off the bus and start walking, he knew. He knew he’d found one.
Chapter 4
They watched people a lot. They had to.
What they did, it needed a sharp sense of insight, an ability to read people and it was a skill that they had long honed. It was important to them that they could pick the right one when it came to it, so they knew at least in part what to expect. Which ones would fight, which would surrender.
Some welcomed it of course, when they realised what was happening to them. But they were rare indeed, and the ones that were ready for it were rarer still. Sometimes better just to plunge them in over their heads and wait to see if they surfaced.
These two were easy enough to read though. The fair one with his shoulders pinched in, hands thrust in pockets, head darting around trying to look relaxed and looking nothing like it. The dark one purposeful, confident, at ease. Looking straight ahead as if he weren’t even aware of not-relaxed in front.
It was the perfect audition really and had taken less time than either of them had imagined.
Once they’d been noticed their fate was decided. Before that even. When the bus had stopped four stops early and he’d had to get off and walk the rest of the way home; when the pub had kicked out without the usual protracted drinking up time and the other one had found himself suddenly outdoors and angry and no barman in sight.
Once the pact had been struck their futures were written for them, and they would both come to know that pact was struck in blood.
Chapter 5
When the bandages were off and the eye patches removed there was a rush of different feelings and sensations. A torrent of excitement, euphoria, but anxiety too. I was thrilled that I felt so good now the bandages and gauze were gone, that I wasn't some ruined shell of a man and as the light was
hed into my eyes again and brought form and shape and sharpness the like of which seemed so new and unfamiliar that it wasn't as though my sight had returned but rather that I'd not had it in the first place. That I had not known what it was to see.
I felt energised and overcome, and as powerful the feeling of raw ravenous lust when I saw the nurse - curves and raven hair in the corner of the room - as much as my appetite to sate any number of hungers seemed to soar up inside me, as much as all that, there was a simmering tension that gripped me.
My eyes were drawn first to the bright glare of the strip lights but then to the high windows and long curtains. It was an inexplicable notion but a clear one all the same, that these windows scared me. Why that should be was irrational to me, but undeniable. Those closed curtains seemed only to be hiding something from me, something that I felt sure wanted in, and wanted me. I could feel pressure from them, tangible and physical, as though they were pushing into the room, reaching.
I recall making attempts to talk with the medical people in the room, trying hard to get my tongue to function, wrap it around words. I tried not to leer at the nurse, whose cheeks and lips appeared to redden each time I looked at her, whose bosom seemed fuller, legs longer, eyes wider with every glance in her direction. Mostly I tried to reassure these people, since they seemed to care so much that I told them I was better, mended.
But mostly I remember thinking that I had to get them away quickly so that I could run. From the room and its oppressive feeling, those large imposing windows that threatened and concealed an invisible menace.
It was 2 am when I rose and dressed. 2 am on the hall clock as I strolled out as nonchalantly as I could past the staff and the bustle, trying not to stare too intently at the signs on the walls telling me how to get out. Worried that it would raise suspicion.