Robert Young - Gatecrasher

He rolled to the side of the bed, opened his eyes a crack and felt around for the glass of water that he knew was on the floor. Grabbing it he lifted the glass, rolled his head upright from the mattress and poured water between his lips. The glass was empty before his thirst was satisfied. He slumped onto his back again and rolled his tongue around his mouth.

He lay there for long minutes stretching his limbs slowly, trying to work out whether he was going to throw up or not, that maybe getting up and moving around might hasten it but also that if he didn’t get another drink of water soon it was probably going to happen anyway. At least if he was up, he could get to the bathroom. Keep it tidy.

The flat was dark as he moved through it, the curtains drawn in the living room, blinds lowered in the kitchen and bathroom. This, he knew, masked the reality of what he faced. He had staggered through the mess the night before on his way to bed and in the subdued daylight it looked worse still and the smell of stale tobacco and lager was thick in the air. Campbell avoided the kitchen entirely and headed with his empty glass to the bathroom instead. Nothing had happened in there.

He ran the tap until the water ran very cold and sipped from the glass before taking larger swallows. Seconds after finishing the glass his mouth felt dry again and his stomach was turning. The thirst was worse than the nausea he decided and drank another glass down in three big gulps.

Stepping into the hall he looked one way toward the kitchen at one end and then looked the other way toward his gloomy bedroom and the lounge on the opposite side.

Even from here he could see mess everywhere and the smell of it once again assailed his sensitive nostrils. Campbell closed his eyes and turned back to the bathroom and shower.

After showering he felt as if a stiff layer of filth had been rinsed away and his clean clothes smelt fresh and felt like it. As prepared as he could be Campbell now set about trying to rid his flat of all the evidence of the night before, throwing open windows to chase out the stale stink of tobacco and alcohol.

As he worked, flashes of the evening replayed in his mind but bigger chunks were missing now than last night and he found himself every so often pausing from one chore or another and staring blankly at the wall trying to summon up memories.

The blonde girl. She’d been a looker he thought. Or at least had seemed so at the time. Maybe that was the drink though, impairing his judgement. Certainly it had impaired it enough for him to empty so many glasses down his throat. To mix his drinks. Wine, beer, Tequila. He could still taste sambuca somehow, though could only barely recall sinking one shot of that. Had there been anything else?

Dropping empty beer cans and wine bottles into black refuse sacks he wondered how much of these he had been responsible for. There were so many. Then his stomach lurched again and he tried not to think about how much he’d drunk at all.

Having woken late he noted that the time was now getting on for three in the afternoon. The kitchen would wait no longer and he moved gingerly to the door, pausing there with his hands on the doorframe, that same invisible barrier holding him back as it had the previous night. The scene before him was a stark and vivid reminder of what had taken place.

An hour later, the kitchen as clean as he had ever seen it, he was back in bed again. The headache, the nausea and the black mood that refused to lift could all be avoided in sleep he reasoned, so he crawled back under the duvet and slowly drifted off.

For two hours he slept as the daylight crept out of the room, as a jumble of images, real and created, tumbled through his mind, as the phone rang unanswered in the other room and an officious male voice droned out a message for Daniel Campbell.

When he awoke he felt no better. The pounding in his temples had grown more insistent and his tongue felt as thick and dry as before. His dreams had been confused and disturbing and though the images faded quickly when he opened his eyes, they had already set his mood low and morose.

Pulling on his dressing gown, not bothering even to dress properly now, he wandered back into the kitchen to fill another glass of water to rinse the persistent thirst. He left the light off though, as if afraid that he might see something he didn’t want to, as if something might have come back. Campbell shuffled through to the living room, hand on his somersaulting stomach, frown on his face. As if this wasn’t bad enough already, Monday was looming now and with it the grind of work. His spirits sank further with this thought.

His employer was a respected research company operating in the retail investment industry. Offering independent assessment and analysis of the many different investment funds available to the public the company had large numbers of staff whose job it was to constantly research and monitor different funds and fund managers in the industry. Campbell was one of those people.

Sometimes he enjoyed it, digging around for information on investment houses or individual fund managers and their teams of analysts or occasionally the companies in which they invested, the stocks they bought, the different sectors. Dissecting the numbers, the patterns they formed. Sometimes it was something to get his teeth into, cutting through all the spiel and the salesmanship and gloss to the facts and figures and trends beneath.

Mostly though, Campbell found himself regularly bored. He read through pages of dull figures and financial reports, fund portfolios, profits and loss and pages and pages of charts and graphs. The columns of figures and the bars and lines often became meaningless shapes and colours and patterns. The meetings with people trying to convince him and his colleagues that everything in their company or their fund was positive and wonderful and up, up, up often became an exercise in chewing back his yawns.

His growing frustration was compounded by his utter inability to decide what else he might want to do with his life instead. The money was decent and the work well within his capability and it was all so… safe. He knew that was pathetic though and often he yearned to escape the tedium.

Turning on the television, he began to jump channels impatiently, finding nothing that held his interest for more than a few minutes. Then an advert for mobile phones caught his attention as he flicked channels again and he lazily placed the tea and the remote control down on the floor in front of him, looked around the room for his own mobile and spotted it across the room. Drawing himself up from the sofa he walked across to the corner of the room where his telephone sat on a small stand and his mobile next to it.

Three missed calls.

His answerphone also displayed a large glowing red 1 on its tiny display.

First checking the mobile phone he found that two of the calls had been the automatic call-back function that let him know he had messages, of which, there was in fact just one.

‘Mr Campbell. This is Michael Bellamy from the hospital. I’m just ringing this number too in case you missed the message on your home phone number but it is very, very important that you call me as soon as you can.’ And he left a number.

Campbell slapped at the playback button on his answering machine, his fingernails digging into the palms of his hands as he clenched them tight whilst the electronic voice crawled through the introduction and time of message.

Before the message finished playing, Campbell was already dashing through his flat to the toilet where finally he threw up and then threw up again, the hospital administrator’s voice echoing through his head.

Monday. 7.30am.

Julius Warren picked up a paper napkin from the table and wiped the egg yolk from his chin. Around the table Stuart Keane and Keith Slater — the rest of Gresham’s crew — sat quietly finishing their own breakfasts.