PART ONE
Death of an Angel
Two spectres swim about the room like Angels startled by the strangeness of their
human form. The first, a fallen angel, whose murdered expression is as dead as the rest of
her, she’s weary and drags herself along. The second, with glowing Cherub eyes, who’s
still alive out there, somewhere in the city, right this instant, without a doubt
emotionally torn to shreds by my actions but, if I know anything of her, still delighting
in the dance.
It’s because of this Cherub that Death in the form of a lamprey, who is most
definitely no angel, has been knocking at my door for quite some time now. This Cherub
follows me into my dreams and turns them sour. Sour enough for the lamprey to scent. This
is one angel who’s killing me softly. As my mother was over fond of saying to me when I
was an over energetic kid she’s wearing me away to a bus ticket.
Each glance from those angelic eyes rips into my flesh to this very day with the
savagery of a wielded dirk. Anger I can take, forgiveness, I find unforgivable. This won’t
go on for much longer, this lamprey that lives inside of me is growing bolder by the day.
She lives off my fear. Soon she will feast on it.
A chip pan that’s caught the gas has found its way into my head. It’s going to
explode sending shards of skull fragments into the already crumbling ceiling. I force my
eyelids apart, the July sunlight’s abnormally furious, it pierces holes in me.
This is hell. I see I’m on my own. I’m not usually on my own but I see that any
woman in her right mind wouldn’t have to look at this dump twice before giving it a severe
body-swerve. I wouldn’t blame her for one instant.
I shift and there’s an odd, hollow rattling. I’m not in a bed. I manage to peer
against the glare. I’m lying on a cracked, tiled floor of a rented room in what had better
be a very cheap hotel. I’m surrounded by a collection of empty bottles and beer cans. It
comes back to me, I took a swan-dive off the wagon a week or so back.
Hell hath no fury like a bottle scorned. My brain’s still manufacturing poison to
fight off the poisonous alcohol that isn’t there. Ergo, it’s poisoning me instead. Every
nerve in my body’s screaming at the top of its voice like the wife I’ve never had.
A little bit off in the distance stands a bottle with more than a whisper of the
amber nectar lurking mid-way up the label. The Booze Fairy’s been here in the night. Bless
her tiny soul. My entire body heaves a sigh of relief. I reach out, unscrew the plastic
cap, and take a big swig. My gut ignites. This masochistic act jerks the self-preserving
part of my brain into action. I take another swig.
Now I’m capable of thought. I take out my Mobile. Push it close against my
half-working, half-open, bleary, bloodshot eyes, it tells me it’s ten-fifteen and it’s a
Thursday. Apart from this it’s a useless lump of tech. The contacts section’s empty. I
like to keep it that way.
I’m fully dressed, shoes and all. My suit’s in good nick. It should be, it cost a
bomb. I might be a piss-artist but I’m a well dressed one. My maternal gran left me a
monthly allowance and, to add insult to injury, my shag-buddy, Nell, keeps buying me
stuff.
I’m always being looked after by birds. Never ask for it, to tell the truth it
embarrasses the hell out of me but there’s no stopping any female once she gets it into
her caring head that some joker needs looking after. Nell’s a frustrated nurse.
I stagger into the bathroom. I’m six-two, the mirror’s at five eight, I bend my
knees a bit. The mirror’s in a nasty mood, it lets me know what a waste of space I am. I
stick my tongue out to show it that I don’t care. How’s that for being all grown up?
My name says that I’m from one of the twelve ancient clans of Scotland but there’s
more than a wee bit of the Viking staring back at me. I run some cold water, splash my wee
bit of a Viking kisser, flatten my hair and settle for that. The bottle’s still in my left
hand. I finish it.
I worked in the States for a fair bit so as our American friends would have it,
this is a window of opportunity. There’s no more rotgut in the room and if I didn’t buy
more last night then there wasn’t no cash. I gaze into the mirror to see if it’s about to
congratulate me on the astuteness of my deductive reasoning but there’s only a troglodyte
living in there so he ain’t able to grasp it.
I’ve no idea of where I am but there’s always an AA meet going on somewhere. Never
again will I put me through this. This time it’ll be permanent. I’m twenty-seven years old
for Christ’s sake, I’m no kid any more. What I need to do is to concentrate on some
addiction that isn’t as dangerous in the dark and doesn’t hurt this much in the light.
These thoughts trip and tumble over each other in their desperation to be
recognised. Before I’ve enough time to change my mind I rush out of the door and down the
hall desperately looking for an exit. I’ve no idea what door it is. Let’s face it, in this
condition I wouldn’t recognise an idea if it fell on me. I find the lounge.
The telly’s on. Alethia Dawns is on. It must be a repeat of a repeat of a repeat of
one of her shows. She’s big time famous, she’s big time shaggable. My heart stops every
time I see this one but then, this happens with just about every other guy in the entire
country. We’re all being hypnotised. She acts on us like a drug.
I felt passion once, real passion, and this is it. This is exactly how I felt, way
back then in my distant, virginal past. Not fondness, not sympathy but that frighteningly
awesome, soul-wrenching emotion that goes under the general heading of love. I don’t feel
much of anything these days. Haven’t done in God only knows how long.
There, on the screen, with her astonishing grey-green, almost angelic eyes, she
just stares, listening to some calming mantra in her head. I’m guessing it’s her director
counting into her earpiece. Suddenly, like some automaton having been switched on, her
features break into that flashing, infectious smile that makes her eyes dance and her
perfectly formed breasts deliberately quiver.
She does a sort of slight flounce of her shoulders so that those breasts now jiggle
and her dress is drawn upwards to expose the full length of legs. She begins to stalk
forward. She’s taunting the audience, she’s taunting me. Asking the question, do I want
her.
The resounding answer is, a million times, yes. In my well pissed confusion, desire
and the ultimate drug, love, fuse themselves into an erection. My emotions are wide open.
I shouldn’t be capable of having an erection in this condition but I do. There’s a burst
of music and rapturous applause.
I’m held bound in front of the home-cinema-size telly. At this moment in time, held
in the instant, there’s only Alethia and me. The dream’s faded, the fantasy has shifted
itself into the background. At this drunken instant, Alethia and me have become a reality.
An item. She fills me, overwhelms me. I relax into it.
Finally, no more hiding, no more searching. I’m home. At rest with Alethia, of all
people, at our own fireside in out own cottage on an island, Skye or Mull, where no one
can reach me. Bliss. No aching, no pain, no promise of the punishment to come. Only
angelic bliss.
And then the instant’s gone, Okay, so I’m half-pissed. I’m released back into this
cheap, cold room in a cheap cold world on the outermost fringes of the cheap cold Milky
Way with only the hangover from hell for company.
Alethia Dawns is in her mid-twenties, bright, rich, witty, and a published
psychologist. Her programmes focus on the three main addictions, sex, chemicals and
firewater, you know, everybody’s into one of them these days. At one time or another, I’ve
managed to be into all three.
She’s right, all of them are drugs. They’re identical if not in nature then intent,
we use all three to get us off the sink-hole we’ve made of this planet. It’s not a matter
of giving up on drugs, in this modern world we just can’t manage to get through the day
without them, it’s a matter of choosing which of them’s going to do you the least harm.
I have an epiphany, this is what I need to change my life. I need to get out there
into the real world and go after some woman just like Alethia Dawns, this is the one thing
that’ll stop the lamprey. A woman just like Alethia Dawns and a family round me, my
family, my kids, our kids. A life that’s accepted as normal filled with shagging, sobriety
and sunlight.
Everybody that I know, or have ever known, has talked about normality as if it’s
boring. It isn’t boring. This is boring. Being a tearaway day in and day out. This is
boredom personified.
A second wave hits me with the force of a Tsunami, why somebody like Alethia Dawns,
why not Alethia Dawns herself? If anyone on the planet’s going to understand me then it
has to be Alethia. The thought startles the hell out of me. This is radical stuff. Her and
me are perfectly matched, well, we would be if I sobered up some, stayed off the hooch and
settled for good sex on a regular basis, I know this for a fact.
I’m astonished that I’ve never considered it before. It’s so obvious it’s downright
scary.
‘Give yourself a reality check, Michael my son.’ I’m talking to myself, again. ‘You
are pissed. A wee fantasy the likes of the one you just had is one thing but what you are
considering here is for real. She lives on a different planet and you don’t own no
spacecraft. She’s from way up there in the stratosphere and let’s face it, fella, at this
right good moment in time you would be lower in her eyes than pond life.’
Disgusted by this rancid chunk of reality, I get back into the hallway then head
for what of all the doors can only be the front one. It’s got mock stained glass on it
with an angel, nimbused in light, ascending to heaven. Why doesn’t the likes of this ever
happen to any of mine? This Christian lot get the one’s who offer them unqualified love
and atheists the likes of me get the one’s that give you the willies. Christian charity my
rear end.
Out past the angel I rush. The sole purpose of her being here is to have us mortals
pause and consider. At this right good moment do I think of God? Do I consider the
fragility of my own mortality? Does the image of Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Mohamed spring into
my favoured brain? Like hell. The only thought that manages to hit my noggin as I stagger
and involuntarily brush against the door on my way out is, ‘Fantastic tits.’
Out I go and stumble straight into the middle of a busy Glasgow Street and its
unforgiving traffic. I wasn’t to know that I was in the city centre, was I?
There’s a screeching of brakes.
“Moron, I could’ve killed you.” The lorry driver drops down from her cabin and is
screaming up into my face from about chest level. As she braked the huge metal fender did
forcefully connect with my right leg. I experienced something like it last year but with a
private car.
I ended up in a plaster that nobody signed for six weeks. The rule of thumb seems
to be--if there’s a crunching sound then a bone’s been shattered but if there’s just a
jarring like now then it can only be bruised. I’m limping so, no problem. Lay on MacDuff,
do your damndest.
I ignore her and her anger and stagger on past. I know it’s swelling but,
thankfully, over the past week and whatever, I’ve downed enough Jungle Juice to
anaesthetise your average adult Killer Whale with a toothache.
I pause for thought, asking myself if I should slap her on the jaw or something.
I’d really like to do this. Not a big slap, just the sort of slap that you see a doctor
give to some woman on the telly that’s having a hysterical fit. I figure it would be an
act of kindness, really. She’s being way too ridiculous about all of this.
I decide against it. Not only have I never slapped a woman, I’ve never managed to
slap anyone. The only slapping I know anything about’s what I’ve seen in gangster movies
so I immediately recognise this impulse for what it is, a booze-induced fantasy.
Besides, by the look of her, unlike me, she’s not a thinker and a lover but a right
wee mental case. What’s clear to me is that this wee head-banger would side-step my slap,
kick me in my balls so that I doubled over and then split my kisser wide open with her
steel-toe-capped, working boots as I was on my way down.
I decide that discretion is the better part of valour and do a runner.
“Want to be locked up, you alky,” she screams, “locked away for your own good.”
She’s shaking, I’ve got to’ve given her a scare but I don’t give a toss. I’d like
to give a toss, I usually I do give a toss, especially as far as the opposite sex are
concerned. Really I do, I can’t pass a polystyrene cup if some good looking young bird’s
squatting on the pavement bursting for a fix without tossing something in but this time I
don’t care. My senses are in stasis.
I know what I’ve got to do. I know where I’ve got to be. I can’t stop for anybody
or any thing, my entire life’s about to change. If I so much as hesitate then I won’t go
on. I’ll just sit down and sleep against a wall. The cops’ll be called in. I’ll experience
the ignominy of having to spend the night banged up in a cell.
I make good my escape and leave her cursing.
Now that I know exactly where I am, I know where the nearest meeting’s about to
take place. I stagger on. It’s only a few streets away in the local Community Centre. All
Community Centres look alike. Red roofed, white walled. Prefabricated and with an
unconvincing welcoming board up outside of the door. In its unconvincing certitude it’s
impossible to miss. I stagger on in.
The meeting’s always at twelve. It’s held down in the basement out of sight of the
real people who frequent the social events that they hold for real people on the main
floor. We do not socialise, we are the fallen. We are tolerated but distinctly unwelcome.
A sub-species. We haunt their imaginations like the vampires and werewolves of ancient
myth.
At the end of the entrance hall I fall down the short flight of white concrete
stairs leading to the basement. I twist my ankle. There’s a sharp burst of pain before
it’s, once again, numbed into non-existence by the moonshine gifted by the Booze Fairy
that I swallowed earlier.
This isn’t an AA group that I attend with any regularity but I’ve been here before,
they know me. Everybody knows me, I’ve been around for about three years now, ever since I
returned to my home city of Glasgow from a life in the States. A country that has quite a
few Glasgows of its own but none quite like this one.
As I go in through the doorway of the meeting room I bump my head on the door
frame, no pain. This joins the previous bumps, I fell against the sink last night when
attempting a wash and again hit my head on the side of the toilet seat as I crumpled past
onto the tiled floor some time in the night.
This joker’s a right mess. He isn’t me. He’s a piss artist. He ain’t anybody I’d
ever want to know. The sooner he gets out of this brain of mine the better. I want to
exchange him. Christ, let’s face it, an orang-utan’s got more self control and a whole lot
more class. I want to specialise exclusively in the shagging drug from now on. I have to
keep my eyes open for the right opportunity. Back to Louis Pasteur, chance favours the
prepared mind and all that.
The basement’s like all official basements, you smell it before you clap eyes on
it, whitewashed and damp. As we are transient ghosts we’re not allowed to leave any trace
of ever having been here. Not so much as a gravestone.
The posters are already up on the walls not with drawing pins but with Blue-tack:
Don’t lift a drink, lift the phone: Trapped? There is a way out. Contact Alcoholics
Anonymous: One Day at a Time: Live and Let Live: Keep it Simple: Sssh, Don’t Wake the
Beast: Only One Drink Away From Drunk, with the Unity, Service, Recovery logo dominating.
The meet proper won’t start for other sixty-five minutes. Three women are already
there. Two of them making the sandwiches and the tea the third setting out row upon row of
tubular steel, green canvas seated chairs for the congregation.
I watch them, women at work fascinate me. They’re so into it, so set to the
purpose, every single thing has to be just so. They actually care about the look of
everything. They want it to be pretty. They want it to give pleasure. Us guys just want to
please ourselves and get it over with, we just toss it all down and see what’s on offer.
Minnie’s the first to respond.
“Christ, young Michael’s pissed.” Minnie’s eighty-five, to Minnie everybody’s
young.
Sandra, who’s in her mid twenties, divorced and looking after her four kids, is
right behind her. “Give him here.”
“What are we to do with him?” asks Karen, who’s only seventeen but is already an
established alcoholic, having been getting legless with her parents since she was nine.
They no longer have lives, they have routines that shackle them to the mindless
repetition of their own personal mantra in the form of active meditation. The knit, they
talk, they walk, they clean, they slice, they bake, they knit.
“Michael, you wi’ us?” Minnie asks.
“Yeah, yeah, of course,” I mumble.
“What’re you doin’ here, you here to quit?” asks Karen.
“Yeah, no, could be, don’t, don’t, don’t know.”
“Punters the likes o’ you sicken ma happiness, Michael, just piss off,” frowns
Minnie.
“Could spit in your eye and flood your memory,” snarls Karen. “Piss off, waste of
space.”
“I’ll phone you in an appointment with the Community Addiction Team, Michael, you
want me to do that?” asks Sandra.
Michael isn’t my real name, nobody tells the whole truth in life and in AA where
anonymity’s the name of the game it gets to be even worse. In AA a Binman gets to be a
fighter pilot, a career criminal gets to be a saint. You name it, it’s accepted and
acceptable. The Community Addiction Team’s National Health, very official. They’ll want a
real name, a real address and to do a real background check. There’s no way I can handle
this. I’ve got to stay out of sight.
“No,” I say so forcefully that I unintentionally spray spittle all over poor
Sandra’s kisser. This sort of thing sets up visions of Dr Frankenstein’s Monster after he
inadvertently drowns the young girl in the original black and white movie. Then he’s
chased through the night by the mob into a windmill and then the mill set on fire. I don’t
fancy allowing nobody to put a match to a bunch of firelighters under me, thank you very
much.
“Don’t want that addiction lot, don’t want to get sober, just lookin’ for some tea
and sympathy. Well, you’re no’ gettin’ it here, Michael, now piss-off out of our sight
‘til you decide to grow up,” Minnie’s serious, her tone’s hard.
I stagger forward. The only barrier lying between me and the wall’s the High Table.
It’s already been laid out. Dark cloth with triangle facing the body of the hall and the
symbol of this particular chapter dominating the centre. A big picture of the joint
founders William Griffith Wilson to one side and an equally large one of Doctor Robert
Holbrook Smith complementing it on the other side.
I see this before the table and me collide. As it’s only a foldaway aluminium
framed table it collapses almost as the same instant as I do and we both fall to the floor
in harmony. They say that crap floats, not in this instance it doesn’t.
Bliss. I black out.
When I waken the meeting’s in progress and I’m sitting in the second row from the
back. My headache’s still with me. My gut’s churning. The acid from throwing up over the
week is still burning my tongue and mouth. My entire body feels as if it’s been kicked by
a rugby team. Apart from this I’m feeling just dandy.
I see an apparition. Only two rows down sits Alethia Dawns, taller than the people
around her, even the guys. She’s here in person and even more beautiful than on the telly.
In some way she knows how much I need to be with her and she’s made a point of coming.
She must have heard about me somehow. I know word’s got around that I treat women
right but I never thought for one minute that it would reach out beyond the outer limits
of AA. Sweet Jesus in the rain, I must be almost famous.
She is famous. She is a television star and yet she’s put me first, in front of her
career, in front of her way of life, in front of everything. She’s made the first move.
She is here and she’s so eager that I don’t have to do a thing. All I have to do is say
yes.
Then, in an instant, I’m dropped from a very great height and land on the cold hard
pavement of reality with an almighty thump. It’s not just painful it’s downright
embarrassing.
What a load of codswallop. My bloodstream has to still be producing brain-rot. This
crap is nothing but a bout of the d.t’s. I’m finally fodder for the laughing factory,
stick me on the assembly belt and shuffle me along on the ga-ga belt, straight-jacket and
all.
I look again, more seriously this time. This isn’t Alethia but somebody that’s a
whole lot like her and is all too real. She’s hot as hell.
I’m dumped unceremoniously back into my own body. Nothing’s changed. Not a thing’s
altered. It’s only the same old me. Headaches, body aches, you name it, doesn’t matter a
hoot, I still have to get randy for anything with long legs, big tits and a heartbeat.
I’m always like this. This is my proof of existence. My way of getting in touch
with the throb of life once I’m on the way out. Always need the intimate caress of a
woman. Right now I need a woman more than I need oxygen. I’m consumed by a desperate
necessity to prove to myself that I’m still alive. I desperately need a fix to calm me
down. I need to know that I’m if not loved then I’m at the very least loveable.
I’m not daft, I know fine well that what’s about to take place ain’t love. I know
exactly what it is but beggars can’t be choosers. I accept it for what it is and glamorise
it along the way until it fits the bill. Just about every relationship that I’ve ever had
except one has taken place entirely in my imagination anyway.
I go towards any woman I’ve only just met as a promise. It’s not the act, not the
shagging itself but that single instant of expectation beforehand when nothing seems
beyond the pale. When I can actually believe that I might just be able to hold it in my
grasp again, the real deal. Heaven not on a plate but in a bed, between the sheets.
But, strangely, the first time, the only time, way back in my virginal years,
that’s exactly what didn’t happen. There was no sex, there wasn’t even any tongue bashing.
There was only the certainty of being adored and of adoring the close proximity of another
human being. A tranquil yet exciting state of existence far beyond the pale of everyday
life.
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