I’ve been sat in the library for about an hour. I did a few rounds of the shelves, but there was nothing new, nothing interesting, so I drifted over to the small table laid out near the door. I took a handful and found a seat near the largest window. It doesn’t let much light in, but it’s long and thin and narrow and sits high up on the wall. The library cuts into the hill, so that high window is at ankle height with the street outside.
I remember sitting there, one summer a few years ago, and this long pair of legs kept walking passed. I couldn’t concentrate on whatever I was reading, something dull and Eastern European, when her silver skin kept causing shadows to flicker about on the wall opposite. Her shadow had a different sheen to it; it seemed to glow all on its own. I must’ve spent a good hour pretending to read and waiting for her legs to appear again.
There are a few pamphlets about national poetry competitions, but I know the type. They’re won by a middle to late aged white woman, with small lips and big teeth and horrible little reptilian eyes. The shortlist is always filled with ethnic writers, black women without a chance and half-Asians who evoke their rich natural heritage. It didn’t bother; it doesn’t bother me.
I start reading a local pamphlet, produced by the council, called ‘Don’t Kill with Kindness’. It tells me how giving money to poor and homeless people is the worst thing to do, and if I really want to help I should ignore them and given money to the council instead. They’d pay for temporary accommodation and buy them a meal; if I give to the homeless, they’re only going to spend it on alcohol and other drugs. At the end, it tells me not to kill with kindness, but to ignore with love. It gives me a number that I can call if I want to donate today.
I don’t bother reading the rest of them. I want a drink.
The Wetherspoons is the only place open this early, but I decide it’s better than nothing. The Moon is fairly quiet; the regular group of old men are scattered around the main room, and the two young guys behind the bar barely look at me when I walk in. I order a stout and see one of them smile for a second before turning away to pour it. I don’t know where to look when ordering a drink, so I just stare awkwardly around.
He pours it in record time, leaving it hollow and light and little more than dark water with a cream head. I don’t care; I pay him anyway and sip at the top so I don’t spill any on the uneven carpet, stained with piss and beer and reeking of cider. I’ve been here so many times; the last refuge from the heat and the sound of the underground bar where I’ve wasted my nights and engraved poetry onto the wall and broken glasses with my apologies. Above all else, The Moon has only one thing going for it – one thing that has it seared into my heart against the loathing of its clientele. I have never fallen in love within these walls; I have never felt the old familiar sting of passion, the slow burn of arousal beneath these hanging lights. I have only hated and drank and recovered from love in this building.
I came close, once. I can’t remember her name, but she was stunning. Long blonde hair, with dyed brunette tips; plump lips and big eyes that seemed to suck in everything around her. I was drunk, all those years ago, after a day out which devolved into a night out which ended in the blurred morning. A friend of mine had introduced us, and she arrived just moments before I intended to leave. She liked art, and immediately started to mock me for being drunk so early in the night. She told me I was a lightweight, and I told her she didn’t start drinking at a reasonable time. A minute’s conversation sobered me up, and my heart sent to booze racing around my body until it was panting for breath. I could have loved her; I’m sure. I’ve seen her around since then, but we’ve locked eyes and I’ve smiled and she’s looked away.
I try to shake her from my head; now is not the time to be thinking of her – I should be thinking of her. They blur together, sometimes; the impossible women that I’ve loved or thought I’ve loved or dreamed of loving. Unrequited love – that’s it; that’s who I’ve been; that’s the bloody phrase I should have tattooed across my arms, and let all who meet me understand the stain that women have left on me. It isn’t sex; it’s rarely sex; it’s the way they look around a room, the way they talk and share their passions, the way their expressions are like majesty with smiles to make me drunk and frowns to drive shards of glass through my stomach.
I haven’t fallen in unrequited love with someone for a long time, but I’ve been searching for that love every day. I search for it in the bars and the empty arcades that riddle this town like bullet wounds. I search for it in the streets at night and looking out of my window with my hands on a keyboard. I search for it, and the possibility of it, amongst the scarce packets of Solpadol that cross the Rubicon of my self-loathing.
Thinking of it, of my life, I take two tablets from my breast pocket, next to my heart, and down them with a mouthful of stout. I do well, I manage to finish my drink and sit there, blinking, for a few seconds before I feel it rise up to meet me and I walk up the stairs to the toilets, slowly, conservatively; just like any old drunk would do after his first drink.
* * *
When I lie on these pages, it’s like the painkillers break apart and shear me in two. All that I am, all that is Carey, fumbles to pen and falls to the floor as he tries to pick it up. All mistruths are the work of ghosts that rattle on these keys when I am on the floor.
But, eventually, I lift myself and we return to the page, the pen and I. To the great void that siphons my intentions and leaves me a quivering wretch, leaves the language a disheartening, meaningless mess that I convince myself has something – a spark of black and white creativity.
All art is sex, I tell myself, intercourse between man and man, man and woman, woman and woman; sex beyond judgement and physical appearance and willingness; sex with all biology removed. And sex is meaningless. Is my nonsense, then, not art? Is this the remnants of intercourse between I and I? Not a platform at all, but a bed of language and madness and pretension? For as long as I can remember, the idea of worth has boiled to itself within my head. Person; product; ideology. The three tenants of worth.
Today, the three are muddled together, with shoddy work promoting a worthy purpose worth more than a masterpiece in defence of sheer insanity. All three as a currency, to attribute meaning to anything, to everything. Worth is the ultimate relativity, and it becomes each of us to define our own worth. Worth is personal; desire is unique; value is all in the mind; beauty is in the eye of the beholder – a filter that drives us mad. When confronted with our desires, we all go a little mad.
Ignore drink – ignore painkillers and unrequited love; the attempts to attribute a standardised value to anything becomes the greatest evil in modern times. A never-ending, bloody-minded war on the self, a cruel and callous way to homogenise us all, to gentrify personality, to splinter it into easily digestible components and portions and to degrade all the complexities of the human soul and its desires and everything we could ever be as ourselves into a numeric.
I blame fear. Fear and man. How can we control every desire, so perfectly; how can we allocate space for all that a person is and could be? Even if we could, the line between the spaces isn’t enough to buffer us from one another – to prevent us from bleeding into one another’s subconscious without even realising it until, one day, we turn around and see nothing that even looks like the memory of something familiar.
* * *
I’m on top of a mountain. Alive, the air snaps at me, every pinprick of chill sensation accompanied by the crack of frost. The window is open and, below me, I can hear the weak music from the teenagers skating around the raised Marble courtyard between the banks and the bars. I feel the sudden surge of anger, but I quell it by biting my lip and clenching my eyes for a moment.
My cock feels cold in my hands, bitterly so. The urine raises something like steam from the porcelain when it hits the back of the urinal and the strong smell of coffee fills the bathroom; I can’t remember the last time I drank coffee.
The emptiness is
back in my throat, hollow and nothing, desirous to be filled. Nothing will fill it, I know; it is the emptiness of Solpadol. It feels like the tablets squeeze me, and all the blood fills my head and makes everything roar. The sound of my piss on the porcelain, dripping into the bowl; the music; the air; the sound of conversation below me; the failing sun – I feel like I’ve been here for hours.
My phone tells me I have another hour until I need to meet her, and it will only take a few minutes to get there. I leave the bar and nearly stumble on the outer step – I must look drunk; I’m not drunk, I’m sure I’m not drunk. My feet move in the direction of the park, as they have done a hundred times or more, when this bloody haze comes upon me; the red fog of my creation. I twitch my eyes around as I walk and even the slightest movement rocks me with its blurring. I think I’m going blind; I think Solpadol is making me blind.
The park is a remnant of more prestigious times, and finds itself surrounded on all sides by the terraced offices of solicitors and architects; designers and photographers and chiropractors. In front of the pond, which sees a few dozen ducks and other birds move in languid, rhythmic patterns, there is a bench that I have spent hours on in the past. There’s an old man sitting there, in a pinstripe suite and a bowler hat and a cane on which he rests his hands. He looks at me as I stagger past, and his haggard old face looks hideously angry; no, not angry, afraid.
I take a seat on a bench a few metres away; it’s on a slight hill heading up to the park’s Pavilion building, and I can’t see him or the pond comfortably, but it’s the second best view in the whole place. I can see through the first floor windows of most of the offices, and even a few of the houses on the other side. An old man was fucking a younger woman above a law firm, his wrinkled yellow arse moving like a steam train as she writhed on the table. A few windows down, boxes upon boxes stood like a wall, and a small child was idly painting on them all with his hands. Between the two of them, a middle-aged man sat typing on a laptop with fury sprawled across his face. His hands moved like a blur, and his teeth would occasionally break through the tight lips to snarl like a wild thing at the screen.
I blink, loudly, and they look at me; they’ve always been looking at me. The child has his hands up against the window, and they’re slowly trailing down the glass, leaving long, bloody streaks that seem to glitter in the dying sunlight. The old man stands there with a flaccid cock and a sagging stomach, beneath a hollow chest that rises and falls every second. His eyes seem to revolve in their sockets, and his long, ape-like arms swing gently to themselves. Beside him, the woman’s breasts hang low, and her rounded stomach peaks over the hair of her crotch. Her hair is long and blonde and looks wet through the glass. Her thighs are riddled with stretch marks. She’s too good for the old cock next to her.
Between them all, the middle aged man has stopped writing, but he’s turned his head to stare at me. The light of the laptop screen glows over his face, leaving him in shadow. I see him, I can only see him, by the light definitions of his work, and the more his words fill the digital page the less whiteness there is. Even as I watch, he starts to fall into darkness, revealing nothing of himself by the glimmer of hungry, desperate eyes, pupils distended by drug abuse, jaw slack with alcohol, throat sagging with age and weakness.
‘What do you want? What are you looking at?’
There is a splash, somewhere, like a ship going under the waves, and they are gone. The windows are all closed, the curtains drawn and the blinds lowered and the sky seems heavier, darker; struggling to stand under the weight of time. I check my phone again, for the time; twenty minutes left. I decide to head over to our meeting point, and raise myself from the bench.
The old man has gone when I walk past the pond again.
Billy Pettinger
I’ve got nothing to say; I don’t think. Even now, these keys click like a heartbeat; arrhythmic; irregular; lazy; blocked by the fat of drugs. Every word is like squeezing blood between the ventricles, every full stop is like a surgeon hanging his head and saying 1:01 A.M; April 3rd, 2016. Solpadol; Kraken; Aberlour whiskey; Brooklyn. All hope of polemic vanishes and I am left with you – in the end, it was you, S. Always you and the audience; like a weight. Every glance at the floor, every eye I’ve failed to meet, every smile I’ve been unable to smile and every tooth that my drink and my sugar and drugs have taken from me has had your name engraved upon it. I don’t think I hate you – I think you’ve made me hate everyone else because how can they compare? How can they compare to the faults of you? How can they compare to the nightmares that we never told each other about?
Unrequited Love; S; no one really does it that well anymore, do they? No one ever did it as well as I did.
* * *
She sits in the window of the bar; the street stretching out ahead of her and the last flecks of light glancing across the glass. Behind her, everything is in shadow or half-lit, a long room of wooden panelling and furniture illuminated by fake candles and electric chandeliers. She’s on her phone, and I see the occasional smile break out; social media, maybe; she’s typing too much, too fast, for any other kind of conversation.
I don’t want to go in, I realise; I don’t want to drink with her and drown Solpadol in my stomach. I don’t want to live endless apologies; I don’t want the potential of not forgotten love to vanish beneath the cancerous heat lamps of time. I regret it, regret it all; regret making my dreams manifest and agreeing to meet her here.
There are two men smoking outside, both dressed in ill-fitting suits that make them look like bouncers. They don’t look at me, but step aside with a nauseating kind of precision, like guards welcoming an officer. I open the heavy door and step into the half-light and the roar of conversation. Behind the coarse accents and the laughter, I can hear a song from 1967 that I haven’t heard in years.
She looks so small, sat there alone. A few years ago, when I knew her, she would have immediately had the eye of some handsome young man by the bar, or one of the staff members would be leaning on the wall beside her, holding his tray vertically and smiling like a shark. She’d put on a little weight, but it didn’t make her look unattractive – there was something in her face that made her older, far older than the intervening years; imaginary lines that formed beneath her eyes and raced down her cheeks to the strong jawline that looked so familiar and whose silhouette was carved into the shadows on the walls of my dreams. I’d seen it through blinds in half-waking illusions of Greenwich Village, standing resolute upon inaccessible mountaintops, strolling along the corridor in the uniform of a guard as I remain rattling the bars with my tin cup. I’d seen it, and her, everywhere but in my arms.
‘How’s it going?’
She looks up at me and smiles. She always smiled strangely, her brows furrowing as though they were rushing down to meet her lips, her nose wrinkling slightly between the two.
‘Yeah, I’m good. How are you?’ She gestures at the empty seat in front of her. I drop the bag beside it and pull the chair out, the legs scraping on the floor even over the noise of the room. She’s chosen well; the door frame and the high wall beside us do a great deal to insulate us from the noise once I’ve sat down, and we’re able to talk quietly.
‘Good, thanks.’ The pleasantries dry up quickly, and she finishes tapping on her phone before putting it into her pocket.
‘So, what’s going on with you? What’re you up to these days?’ There’s a keenness in her voice that seems almost distasteful, almost shameful.
‘I’m working. What about you?’
‘Yeah, me too; I’m still doing part time at that pub around the corner from yours; you know the one? And my mum’s got her own little business going, so I’m helping out with that in my spare time.’
‘Oh cool. Something to do with disabled people, right?’
‘Not really; we’ve made this bandage that you can warm up or freeze and it helps reduce swelling and stops bruising from becoming too bad. It’s doing pretty well; we’r
e thinking about getting a website built.’
‘That’ll be cool.’ I rattle my fingers against the table top. ‘Do you want a drink?’
She says sure and I leave. My heart is hammering, I can feel it in my throat, pulsing through the haze of Solpadol. As soon as I get to the bar, I have to clench my teeth to stop them from shivering, dig my heel onto the metal footrest and let me white-knuckled hands grasp onto the scratched, stained wood. The guy serving me has an earring which distends the lobe, and I can see through it to the Budweiser sign on the wall, shining red and evilly. She used to drink vodka and coke, so I order her one, and myself a cheap whiskey.
The television above the bar is reporting on a thousand immigrant children going missing from faith schools around the country. It isn’t important, I just don’t want to look at the bartender as he serves me, as he upends ice into the glasses despite the weather. The kidnappings don’t seem constrained to one faith, either; Islamic schools, Jewish academies, Catholic primaries and Protestant secondaries – the entire system is riddled with missing children, torn notebooks, a stray shoe outside the schoolyard gates.
I pay him and move back through the crowded bar. There’s a football game on tonight, by the look of the clientele, who all have the same flat face of fanatics. The same red shirts, the same white stripes, the same conversations and identical laughs issued from well-trained throats. They make me a little sick.
She’s looking out the window towards the old Post Office building, and I startle her when I place the glass before her. She smiles at it, then looks at me.
‘What’ve you got?’
‘I dunno. Something, some whiskey.’
‘Do you still not drink vodka? After the last time?’ I shudder dramatically, which makes her grin.
‘No; it’s the devil’s drink – watery shit that makes you throw up if you’ve got any taste.’
‘You should definitely be drinking it then.’