Upon waking Barry felt all right. His mind was still momentarily drunk. Thus, though he was vaguely conscious of the pain, he didn’t quite care. He lay contentedly in his bed.
That initial phase of pleasure passed quickly enough. It was a memory of drunkenness, not the real thing. True horror quickly asserted itself. Each nasty chemical imbibed with last night’s beer but suppressed until now by alcohol began its foul work. The action began in the frontal lobes, squeezing them with a force usually reserved for supernatural vice.
His mind became exposed to all the horrors of existence. An intense despair and pain plunged him into an excess of self-loathing and nihilism. This lasted for approximately five minutes. Then the victim, exhausted, returned to a preternatural sleep. And then returned to the state of hideousness.
This bedevilled state, the antonym of atarxy, continued in waves of sickening irregularity until Barry was finally beached in salt-sweat on the rocks of evil consciousness. His bladder demanded to be relieved. (In most cases this is the motive for rising from the bed.) Getting up was utterly horrendous: he lurched with the dagger of pain that struck him from inside. He almost passed out again. The bathroom was downstairs. But Barry could not descend yet. He sat on the edge of the bed feeling bad. There was a gurgling horror in his stomach. With sadness he acknowledged that mealtimes for the next few days might be a source of ultimate discomfort.
Barry took himself together. He made a fist with his right hand and a rictus with his face. He stood (the room turning blue and speckled) up. He felt wan. He was naked; for propriety he put on jeans and t-shirt. One look at the jeans: no, no look at the jeans. He picked up the t-shirt but it stank of other people's stale smoke. He cast it to the outer reaches and retrieved a clean one from his cupboard. Struggling into it, moaning, he pulled it over his head and lunged to the door.
Now stairs, a landing, stairs: all down, all good. He found the blessed relief of the bathroom. He urinated, sprinkling the bowl casually with yellow-white streams. 'Ahhh-hhh-hh.' There was light filtering through the window making his eyes smart. Birds sounded to be twittering; he felt envy for their lightness. But soon, blessedly, the white bowl was full and he was empty. He took the sacrament of white toilet paper and wiped the rim thoughtfully, giving thanks, and cast it into the chamber.
'Yes.'
Now he stood straight; he fell good and well and tall.
It was a momentary error. He slipped from the straight and narrow to the bumbling ditches and gutters of doom and pain and misery. In fact the world smelt a lot like boke. He began palpitating like a shocked finned creature absent air. No, he would not spew his insides: that would be the final disgrace, he would not let it occur. Bond would not have disgraced himself by emptying his martinis. Nor would Napoleon have spoilt Austerlitz with a spew of brandy. Barry held things tight.
He gingerly and unhappily climbed back up the steep stairs to his room.
Swinging the door closed, clutching his stomach a little, he fell on the bed. No respite. Horizontal as bad as vertical. This meant it was, unfortunately, time to get the day rolling. He took his glasses from the bedside table. Then he descended to the kitchen.
Some people were up already. They made him sick, with their fresh eyes.
'You make me sick with your fresh eyes,' he said in a disgusted drawl. 'I can't even bring myself to look at you.'
He did glance at them all the same, glancing at them glancing at each other. Mr Levin and Mr Emmett.
'Hungover sir?' asked Emmett.
'Bastard behind the eyes!' he announced, pounding his head with his fist for the sake of more misery. 'Oooo-ooo!'
'The worst kind of bastard,' said Levin.
'Ha-ha-ha!' he laughed heartily. He regretted it. 'Wish I hadn't done that.'
'Why?'
‘It hurts.'
The kitchen seemed to swim in several directions. This kind of pain and misery seemed pointless, without direction. He wished some kind of curtain would come down on it, that he wouldn't have to dwell in this atmosphere of reek and -
'What's like reek?'
'Reek is like leek, leik.'
Barry nearly vomited. 'Don't do that to me.'
'You done it to you.'
Barry gaped at this. 'I'm never drinking again. No, I'm not drinking any more. It's not worth it.'
Emmett laughed, mocking this pious intention. Barry felt a kind of insane rage and desire to smite the laughing imp into a senseless quivering ball. His fragility prevented him. He would have been incapable of picking a daisy at the moment.
'I'm not drinking any more!' he screamed, shaking his fists at high heaven (his enemy, God). 'Ooo…'
Emmett and Levin laughed, Levin and Emmett laughed at his relapse into misery; he was as crumpled as his jeans. He felt all his face, his external image to the world, folding under this scepticism, this unfair double attack on him. His weakness prevented him from revenge. Like Monte-Cristo, perhaps, he could wait … but …
'I don't even feel good thinking about a revenge delayed into the future. Ooo… There will be Guinness shits …'
Levin and Emmett crumpled their faces in sympathetic disgust.
‘Dark and difficult,' said Emmett with a sorrowful expression.
‘We are all shits,' said Barry. 'Especially my hangover.'