‘S’not my fault.’ She mutters, sleepily. I look at the table and try to count the drinks we’ve had. There are only three glasses in front of each of us, but I know the bartender has collected a couple. We’re maybe five, maybe six, maybe seven in. The sun’s gone down, and the blue LEDs set in the paving stones are making love with the yellow light of the streetlamps. There’s an old woman at the bar making eyes at the youngest bartender, and he keeps flashing her a smile like she has a chance.
‘No; no, it’s not your fault.’ I lean back and smile at her. ‘Sorry. I don’t know why I said that.’
We sit in silence for a while, and I finish my whiskey. It isn’t very nice; I’ve reached the point where everything I drink starts off in the base of my throat. It’s like I’m drinking everything backwards. The hollowness in my chest has shrivelled, and it’s easy to imagine it drowning in the amount of booze I’ve downed.
‘Do you read much these days?’ She shakes her head. ‘I don’t blame you. There’s nothing worth reading anymore. Nothing’s worth what you pay for it. I’ve been trying to get into indie literature – you know, eBooks from people who can’t get published? I’ve not seen much good so far. Nothing that makes me really think, anyway. I was always kind of expecting this great literary scene on the internet, you know – chat rooms and forums and social media groups instead of shadowy tables in the back rooms of struggling pubs. It might still be out there; I just can’t find it.’
‘The guy I’m dating; C; he’s trying to write.’ She rubs at her eyes with the palms of her hands and, when she takes them away, her eyeliner is smudged. They’re like a haze, like the haze of Solpadol around her.
‘What’s he writing about?’
‘I dunno; some fantasy thing. I think he says it’s an allegory, but I don’t get it.’
‘Nah; I’m with you on that one. I don’t like complicated writing. I don’t like subtext.’
She can’t last much longer now; I’m sure of it. Every few minutes her head drops, like a student’s in the first lecture of the day. There’s so much I want to tell her; so much that keeps me awake in the night and leaves me listening to the screeching of cats, the distant howling of teenagers and drug addicts in the alleyways behind my home, that leaves me blinking in the slice of moonlight that cuts around my blind and makes the floor dance. I could tell her that the thought of her has become the sound of rain on glass. I could say that the midnight sight of her was the same as shivering and sweating my way out of drunkenness and pills. I could say that the memory of her voice was the same as pornography to my waking soul. I could tell her so much, and not know how much of it is true and how much I’ve made the truth and how much is just a feeling, just a metaphor or a simile that fires along the electricity in my brain.
‘He any good?’
‘I dunno; he’s enthusiastic about it, I guess. Does that count for anything?’
We stare out of the window again. I want to tell her no; that enthusiasm was no excuse for talent, that integrity was the poor cousin to success; that you can’t sell out if you’ve got nothing to sell.
It keeps on raining. I can even hear the whisper of it against the glass, against the street, against the town. I can hear it over the roar of conversation that hasn’t gone anywhere.
Her head slips forward occasionally, exhaustion overwhelming her with her drunkenness. I can still see flashes of her in her slack, tired face – but it isn’t really her anymore, it isn’t S, it’s just another woman. Another face above another body. Another mind. Another heart. I am struck, for a few moments, by a spike of anger at all the years had done to her. I’m not angry at the years; I’m angry at her, for allowing time to work upon her with its torturous tools; I’m angry at her for inhabiting a body that changed and grew and was not the body of my memories. I’m angry at her for not loving me, back when I loved her.
Fuck. I can’t remember the last Solpadol. It’s been hours, and it all comes back to me; crashing over me like the ocean. Dragging me down and pushing me down like god’s finger on mine, crushing me against the black mire of consciousness, grinding me amongst bones of all the others, all the other addicts, justifying their addictions with logic and harsh truths, or not bothering to justify themselves at all.
* * *
The only devils in our veins are the ones that we’ve put there ourselves. Deliberately. The devils that have entered our bloodstreams through open wrists and drained our bodies and replaced us with a mad desire. The devils drive us on and applaud the endless, nameless, impossible hunger that flares up across our bodies and leaves us to moan in agony and lust.
I call my desires, my devils, Solpadol and I douse the flames to crackling embers and mute the hunger with chemical emptiness, dizzying, biologically hollow; making nests at the back of the throat and spawning empty children. Every time, a thousand children are born and only one is alive. Only one is filled with the ignoble, flickering hope for freedom.
These cells are the last of the holy desires, if I am God; the last of the burning lights amongst the empty things in the dark. I don’t blame them, the dead, but what choice do they have if not to extinguish the child and cast him out and feed him to the devils and leave his carcass floating in the veins – lifeless.
Perhaps these children end up in my limbs, and that is why I’m always cold. Perhaps they’re the reason why my fingers hurt, and my toes burn with the cold. Perhaps they stop the flow of oxygen to my brain and leave me, occasionally, reeling in my seat and falling asleep on public transport and only waking up when the devils scream through the dead in my veins.
I’d like to say that if you cut me open, and pulled out my heart, and all the veins and arteries connected to it stretched until everything that is me, everything that Solpadol calls its own, is exposed to the air, you’d find the ashes and the bodies and the skeletons of a thousand, thousand ignoble hopes. A thousand, thousand children snuffed out by the fearful emptiness and only sparked again by the next ocean of chemicals to wash over the world.
I’d like to say that maybe, once, there was a bluebird in my heart, but that it choked on the ashes of hope a long time ago.
Allen Ginsberg
‘Has your boyfriend mentioned yellow smoke to you yet?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Yellow smoke. Do you know what that is?’ She shakes her head. ‘It’s when you write something that, at the time, seems incredible. It’s something that burns in your head, comes from the heart, makes you excited to write. It makes you shudder sometimes, and you feel like you’re really making progress. You feel like you’re really going to make it – whatever that means. You feel like you’re moments away from the perfect sentence. You feel like the best writer in the world, like you can rival anything that’s gone before; that every moment has led up to that one, single act of creation and you’re about to realise some great truth. It might not be a great truth that shatters the earth, that causes economies to crumble and empires to behead themselves and makes the politicians and the bankers and the middle managers fall on their knees in self-loathing, but it’s truth. Your own truth. It could be anything, you know; why you are the way you are, why you do the things you do, why you love who,’ I catch myself; her eyes are glittering at me in the shadows; ‘whatever. It’s something important, that’s all I know. It’s something.’
I empty my drink, and even over the sound of conversation and the dull music and the rain still slapping against the windows, I can hear the mostly empty packet of Solpadol crackle in my pocket.
‘So, why do they call it yellow smoke? What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘It’s because it doesn’t last. When writers would stay up all night, when the moon heard the sound of dogs barking and owls hooting and writers’ pens scratching on the paper, the night would bring in these moments all the time. Writing would be like a drug that caused them to crash and burn at their desks and drag themselves to their beds to steal a few hour
s’ sleep before the sun rose against them. And when they woke in the morning, it would all have faded. The words that they had written in a fever had cooled down and read as so much nonsense; so much talentless nonsense. All that meaning would peel away from the paper and rise in the air like smoke and it would catch the sunlight as it cut through the windows.’
‘I don’t think he gets that. He doesn’t stay up all night writing. I’ll ask him about it.’ She wouldn’t; she wouldn’t even remember in the morning. I wonder how much of tonight she will actually remember – will our conversation have been enough? Will her curious nostalgia be sated tonight, and she can return to her boyfriend and her life? Or will her drunkenness leave her unfulfilled and desperate for the same sensations that we used to have.
‘Do you want another drink?’ She looks blearily down at her own glass – it’s still half-full and she shakes her head again. ‘Probably a good idea.’ It’s still loud; it’s still early, too early for me to go home; I could sit in the quiet house with my parents asleep, or waste an hour, or more, scrolling down social media pages until I’m so angry that I fall asleep in my chair.
‘You know what my new favourite pastime is?’ She shakes her head, and pulls her phone out of her pocket. ‘I like to listen to drunk conversations, or any conversation with some kind of desperation to it. I love hearing the old drunks chatting to young barmaids, especially when they get on to some big topics. I don’t even watch comedians anymore; the guys and girls you can find around here, at an empty bar at 3:00 in the afternoon, are a lot funnier, and a lot cheaper. There is a couple that hang about around the corner and to listen to them two talk about Thatcher and Neoliberalism makes me laugh. I don’t think their accents, our accents, are that well suited for intellectual discourse.
They can scare me though, especially when they end up saying something that I’ve said, or I’ve thought, and I realise just how narrow-minded I must appear. It scares me, sometimes, to think that my thoughts aren’t as unique as they should be. That I listen to these people, and smile to myself and call them idiots and hide my face in the sunlight streaming through the window.
When I hear someone else, in the Wigan accent, talk about the Israeli smokescreen of the American media, I sometimes worry that I’m not so unique. That I’m not a broken little blip in the miasma of this place. I worry that everyone comes home and drinks and writes and suffers yellow smoke in the morning.
I’ve started to notice that I drink more when I listen to other people. I need to. That’s all their conversations really leave me with; the desire to drink and continue to drink and drink and throw back Solpadol until everything makes sense again, and all the evils of the world are made staggeringly real. I want to drink until I’m ready to be convinced that we aren’t all just wastelands, covered in skin and blood and muscle and bone. That we aren’t just an extension of the broken paving stones. That I’m something more than a piece of rubble, splintered from the great stone of humanity.’
She doesn’t look up; her thumbs continue to move slowly across the phone’s screen, occasionally puncturing down to hit a key. I lean back and rub my eyes with the palms of my hands. I’m starting to feel it now; the drunkenness; the warmth and the weight and the sheer exhaustion that she must be feeling. I close my eyes for a few moments, and tilt my head back and enjoy the light as it diffuses through the pink flesh of my eyelids.
‘What’s Solpadol?’
What is Solpadol? I ask myself. What is Solpadol, really? Just an excuse; just another excuse in a long list that will end with the grave? Another voluntary addiction that sees me shaking without it, or a real one that would have me tear my tongue out if it would let me get my hands on one tablet more? Could it really be addiction if it hadn’t ruined my life; if it hadn’t turned me onto methamphetamines and ecstasy and anything else that sent electricity shooting through my veins?
No; I told myself; I’m not addicted to Solpadol. I look at her face – she isn’t really interested anyway, I can tell. For a heartbeat, I want to tell her how much of it I’d taken; about how it made drinking cheaper because I would get so, so drunk, so quickly. I want to empty the packet into my mouth and order another drink and turn from the calm warmth to the shivering wreck that could laugh and cry and kill within moments of each other. I want to be a wreck, and show her that I’m a wreck, and blame it all on her. I want to show her the horror that I am, make it manifest and cry beneath naked women and advertising disguised as art.
Instead, I say; ‘It’s nothing. Not really. It’s just a bad joke’ and she looks up at me like I’ve triggered something in her memory; like a forgotten scene is rolling passed her eyes.
* * *
I could have named you Kraken and howled like the ocean. I could have named you Aberlour and cried for freedom and equality. I could have named you Bells and rang you in the street. I could have named you Brooklyn, Trooper, Daniels. I could have named you Guinness and lived in black truth. You are Solpadol; dizzying and weak, limited, temporary, necessary but void of substance, of anything more than the basest of pleasures – you are the distance between my body and my mind; the moments between the thought and the electrical impulse causing my body to spasm with the hollow illusion of control.
I could have named you anything, but it doesn’t matter. I think every word I’ve written has been for you – has been your name in another language. Everything has been you, drunken, poisoned woman holding your head in your hands. Everything I’ve ever touched, created, imagined or written has had you ingrained in its DNA.
But how fickle my eternal love is; if I was me now, I wouldn’t have loved you. I’d have laughed at you, laughed at the scars on your arm, laughed at the nightmares that you pretended to be haunted by; the nightmares that kept you up at night and threw you down the paths of madness with nothing but yourself to blame. You know, whenever I saw you sleep, nothing could disturb you. Nothing could break into your secretive peace and wake you. You always slept through your nightmares with a smile on your face.
Who cares about a weak addiction to a weaker drug. Maybe it’s my fault anyway. Maybe I’m incapable of addiction because I’m incapable of love, and dependency and irreversible attachment. Maybe I’m incapable of love because I am impossible to love. Maybe there’s no beauty here, hiding in the ugly man’s breast. Maybe there’s no poetry in solitude. Maybe there’s no freedom, no liberty, in total isolation. Maybe my ugliness is complete; complete in cowardice; complete in falsity; complete in weakness. Maybe too much introspection isn’t good for me – maybe I use too many question marks – maybe I use too many semi-colons. Maybe, what it all comes down to, is the fact that I’ve looked in too many mirrors and never been happy about the person looking back at me.
The mirrors tell me that I should have been someone else. I wish I looked like Gore Vidal. I wish I looked like William F. Buckley. I wish I looked like anyone but me; anyone with language on their side, and superiority. I wish I looked like anyone but myself. I should have made myself handsome and believable; I should have made myself smile; I should have let me eyes glitter at the beautiful women from across the crowds and the smokeless rooms. I should have made myself pray that women wouldn’t fall in love with me.
I don’t think I’d know beauty if I saw it. Not anymore. Not unless that beauty bears your name, or comes at me through the fog of chemical with all ugliness and fear and fate carried behind it, submerged in the grey depths of the frozen air. The haze of Solpadol hangs about my head, and leaves me blinking and waving my hands to clear the fog; with your name on every pill, everything becomes so beautiful.
* * *
‘Can you feel that old nightmare, S? Can you feel the old nightmare, sobriety?’
She is holding her head in her hands, staring down into her latest drink, and I feel like goading her, mocking her like I swore I’d never do. I can feel it on my tongue; the old familiar bitterness, the hate. I look at my own, a small glass of house whiskey that tastes like
smoke. I pick it up, and my forearm moves at the elbow to swill it around like I remember the old advertisers doing to numb themselves to the sickness of their lives.
‘I can. I always can.’ I take a sip of the whiskey, just a sip, and fight the urge to screw my face up. ‘I can feel the nightmares of sobriety pulling at me, dragging me backwards and pulling on my sleeve and dragging me away from my dreams and into the horrors of sensibility. It rages, sobriety, as furious as a still sea.’ She isn’t listening. She doesn’t care. She’s holding her head together until the sobriety takes over her as well. I picture her moving her hands and looking at me and her face caving in on itself under the weight of the years. ‘I hate it now, you know. I hate the haze of sobriety. I hate the grasping fingertips; I hate its nails; I hate its symphony of demands that never seems to end.’
She looks up at me then, from beneath the shadows of her brows. She looks so far away, on the other side of drunkenness; the drunken field defended against my invasion – defended by the shivering borders of Solpadol.
I take the pack from pocket, and the crack as the pills puncture through seems too loud. It’s like the first piece of earth breaking apart before an earthquake. It’s the first raindrop slapping onto a windshield before the storm washes the road away. It’s the first heartbeat of Lothario, echoing out and spreading into the hearts of a thousand women.
I want to say no. I want to tell her that she looks ugly; that she’s nothing like the woman of my dreams. I want to tell her that her body doesn’t matter to me. I want to tell her that her brain doesn’t matter. Or her heart. But whatever shape she is, there is a whole in my life that is the same weight, the same width, the same height as her. She, and her eyes, have left a heavy emptiness amongst my synapses that makes all these sensations – that makes all the beauty of the public parks nothing but drunken teenagers and taxpayer money.