Plan D

Preface/Postscript

When I told people that I was going to write it all down, people always asked, Why?

I used to say, Why not?

They said I needed to get out more.

I used to say, It’s cold outside this time of year, and I don’t own a coat.

They said I needed to get myself a career.

I’d tell them, I’ve already got a job.

They said I needed to get a life.

I could never think of a witty retort to that one.

Of course, that’s all those answers were; witty retorts from a person who sets a pretty low barrier for wit. Why didn’t I tell the truth? Well, to be honest, nearly everything I say is a lie, in one form or another, mostly down to the fact that I can never quite work out what it is I actually believe. In the space of half an hour, I can go from thinking that I’m the prettiest, most intelligent mother fucker to ever walk this earth, to wondering whether I’d be more at home with sewer rats than people. My memory can’t be trusted to hold on to facts for all that long, either, which only compounds the problem.

But anyway, going back to the original question: Why did I write it all down? As I’ve said, I’ll probably change my mind about this in a couple pages’ time, but I think it had a lot to do with the nightmares. I won’t tell you what it was that set them off yet, because I’ve got a three-act structure to maintain, but I thought that if I wrote it all down, if I could squeeze the truth out of what happened, then it would stop coming back to me every time I closed my eyes. After all, nightmares are born out of fear, and fear is born out of a lack of understanding. That’s what I thought, at least. It soon became less of a case of me sifting through the wreckage, though, than a case of me being swallowed by it. I’m starting to think there was never any speck of truth for me to uncover.

That’s always been my problem, I guess. I tried to see some grand scheme in it all, some truth, or honour, or love, or beauty. But those are the sort of words for an older generation, not this one. Those are words for the generation that beat the bad-guys in the war…Fuck, a generation that had some bad-guys to beat. I sometimes think that we should have hit the pause-button on the world right as their act ended, and stretched out that brief moment when the world made sense for all eternity. I’d like to say that our generation is the one that hasn’t quite got over the fact that our Hogwarts letters never showed up, but I’ll bet ‘generation’ is just another one of those made-up words I was talking about.

I often wonder what kind of person I’d be now, had I never met him. I suppose there’s no point in thinking about it. I did meet him. It happened. That’s that. Anyway, I can’t hang around for much longer, rambling on to what might well be no-one; I said I’d meet Olivia at the Crown twenty minutes ago, so I’ll just have to leave it at this: This isn’t a fable. This is just some shit that happened to me and my friends. I didn’t learn anything living it, and you’re not going to learn anything reading about it.

SEPTEMBER

‘I think we are in rats’ alley,

Where the dead men lost their bones.’

-T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

The Bad Thing

The sunlight streams into the room through my undrawn curtains, making my retinas burn beneath their closed eyelids. As I roll over in a vain attempt to escape its influence, a lurch of dizziness ushers in the beginnings of a head ache. It’s only as much as I deserve, I concede to myself, bearing in mind that last night I imbibed more tequila than a man twice my size - or half the stupidity - would have deemed appropriate. Mingling in with that general sensation of ill-health, though, there’s a nagging feeling that I’ve done something since the time my memory went walkabout that’s going to return with a vengeance this morning, bringing with it the sort of grief that a hung-over person really shouldn’t have to deal with. In a humane society, Sober Jim should not have to suffer the consequences of Drunk Jim’s antics; we’re different people, after all.

My wondering as to what that feeling could forebode, along with why I didn’t take a few seconds to close the sodding curtains before collapsing into bed earlier this morning, is suddenly interrupted by a violent series of vibrations from my jeans pocket. This does not help the burgeoning hangover at all. I quickly lean over the edge of my bed and begin rummaging through my stained and crumpled leg-wear. Not because I’m in a hurry to answer the call - the last thing I can be bothered for at the minute is a phone-line re-enactment of whatever it was I did last night - I just can’t stand my fucking ring tone.

Penny…lighter…wallet (empty)……fag butt - God knows what possessed me to keep this…condom (unused)…and…mobile.

With a press of the green button, the eighties’ power ballad whose name I don’t care to mention, which by this point is threatening to cleave my head in two, mercifully subsides. Putting the phone to my ear, I rasp:

‘Hello…’

As I speak, I can’t help but wonder whether there were razorblades hiding in last night’s kebab. The caller laughs through the crackly reception. I’d buy a phone that actually works, but every time I see one of the adverts come on TV, proclaiming that their particular lump of plastic will provide you with metaphysical contentment, I feel a strange sort of pride at remaining in the Stone Age.

'How you feeling, mate?' the person on the other end says, failing miserably to conceal his mirth.

‘I’ve been better,’ I reply, sounding like a TV on static. With the combination of my shredded voice box and this brick’s reception, I’m amazed he can understand a word I’m saying. 'How is it that you’re so fucking perky every morning after we go out?'

‘Don’t worry, I’d sound depressed as well if I’d been macking Becky Anderton last night.’

‘Bollocks did I. You can’t get me that easy.’

‘Not what the photos say.’

‘Jesus Christ, Dom, have you been stalking me again? You tried socialising when you’re out, rather than just wandering around with the camera stuck to your face?’

‘Mate, the world needs to know about your antics.’ His laughter jumps up an octave to a giggle.

‘As long as I don’t have to.’

‘Don’t think there’s much fear of that one, amount you get through.’

It’s my turn to laugh.

‘I find life’s more fun when you don’t remember any of it.’

The line goes quiet for a moment, giving me time to roll back into bed. The rush of blood threatens to push my headache into migraine territory. I close my eyes and reach for the pack of cigarettes on my bedside table. Surprisingly enough, it’s not empty, which can only mean one thing; I must have bought a second lot from one of those ten-pound-for-sixteen machines in Keitel’s.

‘Anyway,’ Dom continues, ‘we’re meeting at the Crown in twenty for a fry-up. Turns out everyone was too pissed last night to say their last goodbyes before everyone goes away to uni and that, so we’re having another go at it now.’

‘‘Kay, I’ll see you there then,’ I mumble, finding it difficult to speak and light a cigarette at the same time.

‘Alright, talk later bud. Bye now.’

I barely register the words, as I inhale the filthy, cheap fag that was presumably the only brand I could still afford at three in the morning. Dom’s earlier talk of university definitely rekindled some of that uneasiness I’d been feeling when I first woke up. Snapping back to reality, I quickly interject:

‘One sec-’

The words come out as a wheezy splutter as I try to inhale and speak at the same time. Dom, understandably, responds with an inquisitive grunt.

‘Ah?’

I cough a couple more times, my lungs feeling like they’ve got petrol in them. Christ, I’m unfit; I must be on the fast track for cancer. If only Dad could see me now.

When my speech faculty finally returns, I ask:

‘Was that the only bad thing I did last night? I mean, should I be looking out for any other videos on the internet?’

The giggle returns.

‘Nah mate. But come on; have you not seen Becky Anderton? I think that was enough of a fuck-up for one evening.’

‘From the perspective of someone who’s drunk ten shots of tequila, she’s a fucking goddess.’

The giggle resumes.

‘I’m gonna miss you, man. There’d better be another wreck-head like you at uni, or my camera’s just gonna gather dust.’

‘I somehow doubt that person’s sitting at home now, thinking, God, I hope I meet someone at Sheffield who’s going to call me every morning just to let me know what a prick I was the night before.’

‘I hope whoever it is is less morbid in the mornings than you are. Jesus, get off your black arse and come have a full-English.’

‘With plenty of scrambled egg and plenty of fried toma’ah,’ I sigh, wistfully.

‘And a ten percent chance of a coronary.’

‘I like those odds.’

‘So you’re coming?’

‘Yeah, fine. See you down there.’

The phone goes dead. I let it drop down onto the floor, and sink lower into my bed. I flick the ash in the general direction of the bedside table, hoping I left an ashtray out. It’ll be a while before I need to get up; when one of those lot says meet in twenty minutes they actually mean it’ll be at least forty before anyone turns up. With the intention of getting the most out of my remaining time in bed as possible, I stub the fag out on my headboard, flick it across the room, and roll onto my side.

For some reason, though, I just can’t shake that feeling that I’m in deep trouble. Did I start a fight with one of the others? No, I couldn’t have. Dom would have seen it, or at least heard about it. What then? Talking about university set something off in my head, so it’s got to be to do with one of my mates I was out with last night. God, I hope it isn’t Olivia; she scares the bollocks off me when she’s angry.

Suddenly, I get the feeling this isn’t going to be a good day.

The more I roll about, the more awake I get, and in the back of my throat the stale aftertaste of tobacco is mixing with my kebab-tinged morning breath. I try to swallow, but my mouth’s so dry that it gets stuck half way, and once again I erupt into a choking fit of coughs. I know I don’t stand a chance of falling back to sleep now, but the idea of actually getting up and taking part in my life again is far too depressing to commit to. Instead, I remain in this uneasy equilibrium for a while longer, until the dryness in my mouth, coupled with the headache, forces me to prowl out of my room in search of water.

I veer across the landing and into the bathroom, immediately skewing my head into the awkward position that my sink makes you adopt when you need to replace all the body fluids you pissed away the previous night. As I struggle manfully, or with as much manliness as I can muster in this state - which isn’t a great deal - the sink itself starts to take on an increasingly spiteful characterisation, like a sort of overbearing, disappointed parent.

I’m putting you through this for your own good, Jim…it whispers. It’s your own fault for coming home in such a mess…You hurt me every bit as much as you hurt yourself, you know, by acting in this way…

Head finally in place, I turn the tap on and drink like a man dying of thirst. After what seems like hours I’m quenched, and I recommence the arduous process of separating my noodle from my judgemental bathroom appliance. Catching sight of my reflection, however, I do notice what the sink was on about, which makes sense considering that its lecture clearly stemmed from somewhere in that wasteland of killed-off nerve endings, my brain. My hair’s half stuck up at wild angles and half flattened to my forehead by the water that missed my mouth, my eyeballs are red and my eyelids black. I can’t imagine I smell too grand either, but that’s not a theory I’m willing to test. In short, I’m a fucking state. Unfortunately, given the fact that I’ve now got five minutes until I have to be down the pub, there’s not a great deal I can do to rectify this situation, aside from emptying a can of deodorant into each armpit and deciding which half of my hair to correspond to the other. As it turns out, it takes less effort to make the flat half match up with the shambolic one. All this time I continue to assume that my reckoning of an extra twenty-minute cushion will hold true; if by some miracle everyone else decides to turn up on time, I’ll be dining alone. Still, there’s no reason to put my shattered corpse under any undue stress by walking there at anything faster than an amble.

The bare necessities of hygiene - hair, teeth, armpits - handled, I start down the stairs towards the front door. I make it to the penultimate step before I realise that I’m still wearing nothing but the pair of grey Y-fronts I fell asleep in, or, at least, passed out in. On my second attempt, this time stylishly garbed in a hoody and the same manky jeans as last night, I manage to get my trainers on and get one hand on the door handle. As I do this, however, it occurs to me that after last night, I’m almost certainly broke. I dig through my pockets, hoping that I came home with something, anything. Chancing upon some metal and circular object, I grasp it and pull my hand out. Ten pence. You can’t buy tap water with ten pence anymore. A single-word exclamation - ‘Bastard!’ - escapes my lips. I don’t get paid for another week. There’s three days of menial labour between now and then.

Only one solution remains, at least only one that has any hope of me finishing my morning with a stomach full of saturated fats; to put on my cherubim-face and go and plead with my mum for cash. This is, regrettably, a course of action that involves sacrifice, since the budget in my house falls under the administration of my step-father, Paul. The English language needs to utilise only a single syllable to convey Paul, in his physical, intellectual and emotional entirety, and that most useful of syllables is ‘cunt’. Preferably italicised for emphasis. Thanks to this important factor, any monetary transaction that occurs between Paul and myself is less him making a one-way gesture, as Mum would have me believe, but rather a trade; he gives me one note of his legal tender, in return for a giant wedge of my self-respect.

Nevertheless, at this point I’d probably hack off a couple of fingers in exchange for some bacon and eggs, so I hastily rearrange my face into that angelic, piteous expression which, for some reason, seems to loosen a parent’s purse-strings. I console myself with the thought that this will be a moral victory; little does my step-father know, Becky Anderton claimed my last shred of self-respect last night.

I open the door into the kitchen.

'Mum…can I borrow a tenner please?'

The look on her face doesn’t fill me with promise. But she’s not thinking about the money, she’s pissed off about something else. Very pissed off, in fact.

Oh, fuck.

Now I’ve never had an out-of-body experience, and the only frame of reference I have to compare what followed is an anecdote a friend once told me about the time he tried ketamine, and he claimed that it was like the rest of the world was on the top of a twenty-foot tower, and he was stranded at the bottom of a well, when in reality he was sitting on the sofa, swatting imaginary flies with a silly grin on his face. I felt as though time and space had been suddenly rewound and I was returned, as a spectator, to the scene that unfurled last night. The door opens into this very room, much as I had just done, or was going to do when I woke up hung-over seven hours later - I’ve never time-travelled before, so I’m not entirely sure which tense I should be using - and a smiling loon swaggers in.

The figure looks somewhat blurry around the edges, but I quickly identify it as Drunk Jim. He fumbles in his pockets for a moment, swaying on the spot, and pulls out a pack of fags. I recognise them as the same pack I would be smoking in bed the next morning. Putting one in his mouth, he returns the packet to his jeans and probes around in there some more, eventually producing a lighter. I watch as he flicks it again and again, producing only sparks. This is especially exasperating, since the cigarette pinched between his teeth is back-to-front. Jim, of course, does not notice this until after he’s coaxed the lighter into life. At this point he assumes a confused expression, wondering why he can’t feel the familiar, calming journey of pollutants flowing first from his mouth, into to his lungs and then his bloodstream, finally letting his brain know it was time to flick the little switch that turns on the dopamine supply. The penny eventually drops, and after another thousand clicks, the fag is lit at last and Jim is free to continue his wavy passage towards the sink.

Despite not being able to stand up straight without using the counter as a sort of alcoholic’s Zimmer-frame, the drunk figure then sets about procuring himself a glass from the cupboard directly above his head.  Though not initially successful, he manages not to crumple into a heap on the floor, as I would have expected him to. Unfortunately for that sense of unease that would be cropping up the next morning, all the remaining glasses seem to be shoved right to the back of the cupboard. Pinching the cigarette in his teeth and assuming a you-can’t-defeat-me sneer, Drunk Jim clambers up onto the kitchen counter. In doing so, however, he makes the fatal mistake of sacrificing the stabilising crutch once provided by his current platform. Pressing on with a steely resolution that would be admirable under different circumstances, he reaches further and further into the cupboard, stretching every sinew from his shoulder to his fingers, finally claiming his prize. But as my pissed-up doppelgänger enjoys the moment of victory, he relaxes a bit too much and his sense of balance finally achieves what it had been threatening to do since he first came home. And never being one for half-measures, when Drunk Jim lets his body give in to booze, he does so as catastrophically as possible.

The hand and arm with the glass attached to it fruitlessly scrabbles around the cupboard to find some source of grip, tearing mercilessly through the neighbouring crockery. Drunk Jim hits the floor with a whump, accompanied by the sound of a hail of tableware smashing into the lino around him. Judging by the somewhat confused look on his face, it took him some time to work out that he has just moved from a vertical position to a horizontal one. When his spatial awareness finally returns, Jim resumes the task at hand; getting a non-alcoholic drink to ease my hangover the next morning. Nice gesture though it may be, this has all become a monumental waste of time by now; I already know that the glass of water that Drunk Jim is going to such lengths to consume is going to provide about as much help for my morning hangover as a Frank Capra movie would have helped cheer up Ian Curtis.

Nonetheless, the dark figure perseveres, almost noble in his quest to give his future self some small token of assistance. He brushes his fringe from his eyes, managing to look pensive for a moment as he tries to decode his blurry visual input, and picks up one of only two glasses that hadn’t smashed upon their collision with the floor. Hard part of his task done, the eyes are allowed to glaze over again, and Jim stumbles to the sink and turns on the tap.

I see her before he does. A dressing-gowned silhouette in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, rounder and more feminine than the skinny one who remains oblivious to her presence, staring out the kitchen window leaning on one hand and using the other to alternate between a swig of water and a drag on his cigarette. She barks to get his attention. He takes another drink and turns away from the window, still keeping an elbow firmly on the kitchen counter.

She asks what the hell he thinks he’s doing. Now from my position in the gap in time and space above them, I can understand the gist behind Drunk Jim’s response, and therefore find it almost satisfactory; certainly nothing to flip out about. Unfortunately, though the words that slur from his vacant-looking face might well comprise an accurate account of his predicament, they tumble out in a seemingly random order. His mother, at three in the morning, must not be in the mood for disassembling syntax, and her response is rather more sternly, and coherently, delivered. The brunt of the reprimand concerns Jim’s shenanigans in the ten minutes prior to her appearance, but it soon tails off into a more general rebuke, condemning actions performed under the influence of alcohol and bemoaning the lack of activity whilst sober. She goes on to conclude that Drunk Jim - and by extension Sober Jim, she doesn’t differentiate between the two - is wasting his life; he’d apparently done fuck all since he left college, after failing his A-levels, he worked a shit job for barely three days a week, and he was throwing any intelligence he had away by every other night going out and massacring brain cells by the million.

Whilst I’ll admit I can see her point, that doesn’t necessarily mean I agree with it. Sure, alcohol might be the last resort of the man with nothing better to do with his life, but all the people who think they have got something better to do tend to be insufferable dicks. Plus, their higher callings never seem to have anything to them besides an unearned glaze of self-righteousness: I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument for why constant inebriation is any less productive than working nine-til-five every day, looking for that promotion, so you can put an extra 4 inches on your TV and start exerting your ego on some poor bastard you yesterday called your equal. Fuck that, a couple pints boosts your sense of self-importance just the same, and that way you don’t need to lick arse and hang a noose around your soul to get it.

Probably noticing that he’s not in an articulate enough condition to embark on this debate, Jim answers with a simple ‘whatever’, and flicks the fag butt that he’s been inhaling long after there was any tobacco left in it out of the window. He edges past the woman in the doorway and erratically makes towards the stairs. Judging by her reluctance to let him past, she isn’t finished talking. It’s like watching a Ken Loach version of the Billy-Goats Gruff.  

As the dressing-gowned lady continued to shout at the bedraggled figure, my meander through the recent past gives way and the present comes crashing back down around my ears. This unfortunately robs me of the pleasure of being able to float through life as a repercussion-proof observer, and I’m forced to face my mum again through my own eyes as she surveys me, still wearing the pink dressing gown. If only this flashback could have interrupted me before I walked in here. Now burdened with the knowledge of what occurred a few hours ago, my unease increases. For a moment I wonder how long I spent playing